The Content Ethics Study In Weibo Communication

With the rapid development of communication technology and thinking pattern,new media represented by Internet and mobile phones has become a flourishing industry.The development of technology prompted the emergence of new forms of media, socialmedia is one of that forms. Social media is a new kind of network that features its socialfunction and media property. On this new platform, the information is filtered by thenetwork node (person) and the social relationship it created made people connectedclosely to each other. In the information age, the medium speaking rights graduallychanged. The freedoms of expressions of audiences find more way to express andinformation flows surrounded us quickly.Weibo, a Chinese version of micro-blog, is a kind of social network. It’s an openplatform based on users’ relationship and people could share, exchange, spread andacquired information on it. Users can update Weibo with no more than140charactersmassages and pictures, and build personal community through WEB or WAP. In2009,Sina launched a Twitter-like product-Sina Weibo, and changed its name to Weibo inMar,2014. Weibo has brought big influence to China and become the more creative andstrongest third-party supervisory power. But at the mean time, it brought more and morecritical incidents. During the process of crisis communication, many ethical problemscome out such as fake information, internet abuse, and privacy leak and so on. It’simportant to have a systematic study on the crisis communication on Weibo platformand explore reasons and solutions to its ethical problems.This thesis consists of five sections including this abstract. In Section One, itanswers the problem of why should we study the ethical problems on Weibo. In SectionTwo, the author introduces the related communication theories of Public Sphere and usda conceptual framework of Lasswell’s that is useful to analyzise the ethical problems onWeibo. In Section Three, the author elaborates various ethical troubles with theories andcases, and then makes comparision between the ethical troubles of Weibo and Twitter.In Section Four, the author explains the reasons of ethical problems. In Section Five, theauthor presents the findings and conclusions, and she puts forward a new hypothesis ofharmonious ethical and moral system.