An Empirical Study Of Information Distribution In Online Forums

After more than three decades’ rapid development, China has become anindustrialized country which faces different social conflicts in the process oftransformation. Thanks to the spread of internet technology, a great amount ofChinese people nowadays get used to extend their opinion online.In recent years, online forums play an important role in collective actions in China,obviously, it is one of the most important opinion fields. Based on detailed analysis ofthe characteristics of online forum, this paper makes profound observation on theinformation distribution of online forums.This paper choose Tianya.cn and Kdnet.net for the empirical study. They are two ofthe comprehensive forums, which enjoyed significant position in China. Then, threecases of collective actions focus on public safety, food safety and corruption havebeen selected to explain the mechanism of public opinion in online.This paper suggests that different categories of online forums showing differentfeatures in the form of public opinion. First of all, large comprehensive forums are"information center" of public opinion. Secondly, the users of featured online forumsare more active to extend their opinion than in other forums. Third, public opinionspreads more easily among forums shared similar features.Based on above analysis, this paper also proposes some constructive suggestions andfurther research expectations for relative studies.