Further Investigation On Characteristics And Causes Of Internet Populism

As the internet comes into vogue these days, a growing cyber citizens have appeared in cyberspace. The populism mood hidden among people is released in cyberspace, which forms the internet populism having special expressing method. Depending on new media platform, the theory of populism has an increasing profound impact on the realistic society, which has been the research hotspot in the internet public opinion. “ The anti-mafia campaign” elevated twice heated public discussion on the internet after the Chongqing Event, which was in December, 2012 and in May, 2014 respectively. Focusing on the hot issue – “ the anti-mafia campaign”, the author chose two typical cases – public's remembrance and recognition on the Chongqing anti-mafia campaign and the trial of Chongqing policemen's inquisition by torture by searching key words in Baidu and searching on directional site from the Netease news portal, and analyze the follow-up comments. The author chose the former 20 heated follow-up comments as the analyzing object. By analyzing the collected follow-up comments, the author finds that the cyber citizens' comments of the news on the internet show an obvious populism trend, having the characters as follows: idea of people's supremacy, idea of anti-elites, idea of morality's supremacy and idea of adoring Charisma's leader-group style non-rationality. In spite of this, when the discussing topic is converted, the expressions of the cyber citizens become more complex, which may conflict with the law, or being compatible with the law. This displays the tensile force between moral discourse and lawful discourse. This article will discuss the causes of internet populism from the country, media and cyber citizens – these three dimensions, based on Sunstein's Group Polarization theory and Unstructured Crowd Theory. It also elaborately analyze the influences of social structure state, the environment of internet public opinion and the characteristics of internet expressions, people's attitude characters and group's psychology to the generation of internet populism.