The Influence of Social Media Sentiment on Online Public Opinion in the Post-truth Era

Abstract

With the continuous development of the Internet, social media appeared and gradually entered everyone's life. Social media platforms not only give individuals the opportunity to be heard but also make the truth drowned in the ocean of information. The vast and broken information flow makes it difficult for netizens to sort out the complete and objective truth the first time but is provoked by some of the more attractive information fragments, and the post-truth era will follow. When people invest more time in the virtual world, the boundaries between the virtual world and the real world are constantly merging. Therefore, when the virtual becomes part of reality, part of the virtual becomes a reality. As far as the field of news and communication is concerned, the public opinion position has shifted greatly from offline to online, and whether it can reasonably guide the influence of social media emotions on online public opinion largely determines whether the formation of post-truth can be avoided, and is also closely related to the credibility of the media and the government, and is related to the happy life of every citizen. Therefore, this paper systematically studies the influence of social media emotions on online public opinion in the post-truth era, and finds that negative social media emotions will promote the formation of post-truth and the extreme development of online public opinion. Therefore, it is very necessary to reasonably guide social media emotions to a benign development.