How Online Public Opinion Promotes Policy Agenda Setting?

The emergence and development of new Internet media has become an important channel for public expression and voice,greatly expanding people’s right to freely express their opinions,and greatly improving the openness and diversity of decision makers.On social media platforms,various social hotspots and public interest demands collide fiercely in the field of online public opinion.Online public opinion focuses on reality,arouses people’s attention to reality,and carries urgent policy demands from the public.Online public opinion transforms major public issues into policy issues and plays an important role in setting the public policy agenda.In recent years,livestreaming marketing has become a new economic format,but the lack of supervision has also triggered a series of hot issues,and the rights and interests of consumers have been greatly damaged.The livestreaming marketing cargo rollover event occurred frequently.Simba sold bird’s nest with sugar water event in 2020,Luo Yonghao sold fake sweater event,and so on,which caused hot discussion among the public,so that the issue of livestreaming marketing cargo supervision received attention under the promotion of online public opinion,and then the regulatory policy was introduced successively.On December 20,2021,Viya was prosecuted for tax evasion and fined 1.314 billion yuan,which caused a great disturbance on the Internet and once again pushed the livestreaming marketing to the forefront,and further promotes the continuous improvement of the supervision policy of livestreaming marketing under the promotion of online public opinion.This paper uses a case study approach and builds an analytical framework based on the multiple-streams theory to analyze the regulatory policy agenda setting around "Simba sold bird’s nest with sugar water" incident and "Viya evaded taxes" incident.This paper comprehensively utilizes multiple online platforms to obtain relevant information and data on cases as comprehensively as possible,exploring the role of the problem streams,the policy streams and the political streams in the process of setting the policy agenda,and analyzes how the online public opinion promotes the convergence of the three streams to promote the setting of the policy agenda.With the help of public opinion on the Internet,the problem stream is formed by the focus of attention on the focus events and the social indicators presented by big data;experts,scholars and opinion leaders actively offer advice and suggestions on the Internet,which contribute to the policy streams;national emotional pressure and government attitude contribute to the political streams.Online public opinion has promoted the coupling of the three streams,and the probability of coupling has been greatly improved.It has opened the window of policy,and has successively promoted the false propaganda of livestreaming marketing,tax evasion and other issues into the policy agenda.On this basis,it summarizes the logic of the setting of the policy agenda for the promotion of online public opinion to answer the research questions in this paper,and attempts to propose optimization suggestions from four aspects:the problem streams,the policy streams,the political streams,and the window of policy.This paper takes a small view of the big picture and uses online public opinion as an entry point to explore policy agenda setting as a logical starting point for policy,in order to give full play to the function of online public opinion in enhancing public governance capacity and promoting timely responses of public policy to public demands.