A Research Of Weibo Trending Topic Frames And User Participation During Regular Covid-19 Epidemic Prevention

The convenience brought by the mobile Internet is rapidly changing the way people obtain information.Today’s young people are becoming more and more accustomed to acquiring news through social media.At the end of 2020,the daily active users of Sina Weibo(Weibo)reached 224 million,of which nearly 80% were young people born after1990.During the 2020 new coronavirus pandemic,Weibo has become an important platform for the public to transmit information.Therefore,the researcher planned to explore the frames of the pandemic presented on the Weibo trending rank,how the audience participate in them,as well as how different opinion leaders play their roles in influencing the public opinion by guiding the trending topics.Based on the framing theory,this study categorized 694 trending topics about the pandemic in the past six months into 5 frames,explored their main characteristic,and analyzed the relationships between them and the opinion leaders of the trending topics.In order to understand the difference on communication effect,the study analyzed the correlation between frame types and the user participation,represented by the number of likes,comments and reposts.The research divided the trending topics into: action frame,consequence frame,imputation frame,medical frame and comfort frame.The analysis results found that action frames are most common in domestic trending topics while the imputation frame is the least common.Among the topics of foreign covid-19 events,the most common type is consequence frame,while the comfort frame is the least.Secondly,the study found government official opinion leaders played a significant role in guiding the pandemic trending topics.Their preference for the imputation frame was significantly lower than that of market-media opinion leaders.Relatively speaking,market-media opinion leaders guided significantly less comfort frames than government official opinion leaders.Finally,the research found the comfort frame has the highest user participation,followed by the action frame,and the medical frame and consequence frame are least participated.