A Study of the Impact of Sina Weibo on the Formation of Public Opinion in Mainland China

    In today’s modern time, social media has a huge impact on political environment. How the World Changed Social Media claims, “ Such political activity as there is on social media is usually at a national level and is conducted mainly by supporters…” (Miller 142,143). Social media presents a national level bias. During the last ten years, politics has gained much traction on these sites.  For example, campaigns for national

Ever since the 2016 presidential election, many people are turning their attention on the influence of social media and it’s overall impact on democracy. Personally, I think social media is playing a huge role in the changes of democracy; and social media is also responsible for the challenges democracy is currently facing. Social media is influencing the slump of democracy because of fake news, contradictory views being expressed online, and automated accounts also known as “bots.”

Sina Weibo (hereinafter referred as Weibo) is a microblog in China that is akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook . It is one of the most popular social media platform is China which has 600 million registered users in 2013 and 76.6 million daily users in 2014 . The vast number of users allows faster and easier communication and information spreading, which then creates social benefits which traditional media did not offer (Chang, 2013). Weibo has formed a lively virtual public space (Magistad, 2012) where Chinese citizens communicate and which is a main source of immediate news.

In the past ten years the way we as a people communicate has changed greatly. No longer is it uncommon for conversations to not be face to face and now more so than ever conversations take place through text. As with any change there will be and is push back to it. The conflict over the consequences of the social media dependent society have now intensified as a result of social media playing ever greater roles in how politics is seen and even conducted. This has been a major societal question since the presidential election of 2008 and the debate has been written about, discussed, and argued by thousands of different politicians,

The impact social media has had on American politics is undeniable. Because of social media it is now more difficult than ever to decipher between what is fact and what is fiction. This new form of political information sharing has left people more uncertain than ever before. Despite its downfalls, social media has had a massive impact on politics and it would be negligent to ignore it in its entirety, however social media should be used and consumed in moderation and in conjunction with other forms of

Social media has emerged as a prominent political platform that attracts voters otherwise unreachable. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and bloggers are replacing traditional media influence on public opinion with a more efficient outlet. “They target niche audiences with growing precision, contact hard-to-reach voters, extend their influence as online supporters forward their messages and carry out many campaign tasks at much lower cost than before." remarks Tom Price author of “Social Media and Politics: Do Facebook and Twitter influence voters? Social media has the potential to be an even more dangerous medium of influence because of its “ability to collect enormous amounts of information about individual voters — through social media and traditional

Embassy’s blogs and micro-blogs begins to address the question of how nations can best use social media. The authors examined a blog series called “My Hometown - Introduction to the U.S. Cities.” The blog posts talked about housing in the United States. The entries received some negative reaction from the audience in China. The authors said “some Chinese accused blog posters of understating the cost of living in the U.S.” (Zong & Lu, 2011, p. 546). The authors noted that the entries were made when housing prices had sharply increased in China and had “become the hottest topic among ordinary Chinese people.” (Zong & Lu, 2011, p. 546). Although the posts garnered a lot of attention, the authors declared that “attention does not equal a favorable impression.” (Zong & Lu, 2011, p. 546). I believe we could learn more from this example by asking additional questions of the embassy leaders. Did they consider the possibility that the blog audience would react critically? Did they hold any discussions about the reaction? And did those discussions guide their future blog posts in any

Theaker (2001) states that the essence of network public relations is the contest of discourse power and the guidance of network public opinion. If the charity has this kind of advantage, it would be in the dominant position of the public opinion, and it would have a better effect when handling some events. Under the network environment, information propagation range, the propagation time, communication space, interaction and cost could have more advantages that direct touches tens of thousands of Internet users, communicate with the public all over the world at any time, and could be more flexible to carry out publicity and public relations activities. So the charity could seize the opportunity to use the Internet for public relations activities in order to establish a sense of trust in the public mind and promote charitable activities. In 2011, in the Chinese social networking site Weibo, a people named Guo Meimei posted luxury cars and luxury clothes and bands to show off her wealth, but the profile showed her work units is the Red Cross Society of China, which makes the Red Cross Society of China under the pressure of public opinion. It shows the rapid spread of the network, as well as the importance of network crisis public

As of the end of December 2013, the users in China had risen to 618 million with the social network usage rate, which includes blogs and personal spaces, standing at 70.7%. The duo also show that these sites had become the main channel through which people gleaned information; in addition, they suggest that Chinese social network sites differed from similar sites in other countries where Facebook held the lion’s share of the market; by contrast, the ranking in China is Qzone (50%), Renren (37%), Sina (36.6%), 51com (27.1%) and Kaixin

Web- based communication plays a significant role in shaping the social conflict in which the policies are created. The different process of policy making is determined my multiple social factors. How much impact does web-communication have on public attitudes and policymaking? Has the growing trend of social media affect policy maker’s points of view? In this essay I will discuss how social media affects public opinion and the impact of web-based communications on policymaking.

The advent of social networking platforms in the mid-1990s revolutionized the way we communicate. Founded in 2006, Twitter is a particularly unique platform that expands and accelerates our means of communication. In this essay, I examine Twitter's infrastructure with respect to Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" and Roland Barthes' "Myth Today." I also cite Dhiraj Murthy's Social Communication in the Twitter Age and Bala A. Musa and Jim Willis' From Twitter to Tahrir Square: Ethics in Social and New Media Communication in my investigation of Twitter's impact on social participation and activism. Through my analyses, I argue that Twitter's infrastructure expands and accelerates our means of communication. I also argue that Twitter

Nowadays, political leaders have to face an unprecedented scrutiny by the public opinion. Due to the advances in the communication technologies and the advent of the internet, the electorate have several means to evaluate a politician's performance. Consequently, it is harder for a politicians to unyield to public opinion in order to follow a particular agenda and objectives. Since the social networks play an active role in monitoring a politician's activities, it's impossible for any modern politicians to deny that the public opinion is a main stalwart for his political survival. Therefore, a successful contemporary political leader has to not only deliver effective policies, but also has to pursue an agenda that is aligned with the public opinion's principles and desires.

As a logical consequence, Postmes and Brunsting (2002) reasoned that the Internet is changing society because people's cognitive processes, triggered by access to information and communication, replace the strong social ties that traditionally underpin committed activism. In simpler words, in the past, humanity used the herd instinct as the main driving force behind committed forms of activism. Thanks to the Internet, we climb another step or three on the evolutionary ladder, and simply do away with the herd instinct and replace it with reason. The argument, if put this way, does not sound particularly strong. What can be taken away is that social media is still evolving, that social media changes the way we – or most of us communicate, that social media is used in social and political activism, and that the Internet increases quantitative if not qualitative access to information.

In less than two decades, social media has revolutionized modern communication and information sharing. What began as a simple form of social networking has turned into innumerable platforms for people around the globe to share ideas, create and share businesses, promote brands, read news from various sources, as well as share and find vast amounts of information, among many other uses. Thus, with a few clicks of a button, people are now able to interact with someone on the other side of the world. The capabilities created through social media’s many uses have forever changed global politics, business, and interpersonal communication.

The term ‘social media’ has become a broad-term to describe a large number of online systems that serve as a platform for the generation, and distribution of user-generated content. Social media creates a virtual social space, where a large number of users come together and interact with one another. These interactions can be either structured, such as responses that are moderated on blogs, semi-structured, such as a discussion between an extended network on Facebook, or unstructured, such as the anarchial functioning of Twitter.