Empirical Study On The Reversal Of Public Sentiment Aroused In Hot Issues

Taking two hot issues happened in China:a pregnant woman fell down from the hospital building during stage of labor in 2017,and a bus fell off bridge into river in 2018 as cases,this research aims to bring some insights regarding the reversal of public sentiment(or opinion).The changing of public sentiment is an important phenomenon for us to explore and through which we could get a better understanding of communication context nowadays.Scrapy(an open source framework for extracting data from websites)was used here to retrieve Sina weibo(microblog in China)as well as the information of people/organizations who uploaded weibo.Then,varies analyses were conducted,among which sentiment analysis was the main method.All the analyses could be grouped into three parts:based on the content of weibo,based on the sentiment score of weibo,and based on the information of weibo uploaders.The results show that media still play its role in agenda setting;the largest weibo volume appeared along with a clear fact that may challenge public's common sense;the highest sentiment score always occurred later than the largest weibo volume;different concerns led to disparities in sentimental responses;people tend to give opinions on issues more related to themselves;men express more than women and people live in eastern coastal provinces express more than people in other areas at Sina weibo.