The Impact of Sentiments in Weibo Posts on Commenting and Reposting Behavior on the Platform

Abstract

The aim of this study is to understand the impact of various types of, and the intensity of, sentiments associated with information on Weibo on the rate of reposts. For the study sample, 24 public incidents were randomly selected out of the top 300 public incidents on 5 microblog platforms for the year as ranked by the number of searches associated with each incident. Then, 7114 effective posts on these 24 public incidents were extracted from the Weibo (Sina’s microblogging website) platform. The extracted Weibo posts were analyzed for the type and intensity of sentiment contained, the target subjects of said sentiments, information about the blogger, etc. The number of comments on each post as well as the number of times it was reposted was also recorded. The key foci of this study include the relationships between the directionality of sentiments expressed in Weibo posts, the intensity of sentiments expressed in Weibo posts, and other variables; and factors that have an impact on the number of comments on a Weibo post and the number of times it is reposted. We found that the sentiment intensity associated with the Weibo post has a highly significant relationship with the number of times the post was commented on and reposted.