Research On Emotional Characteristics And Evolution Of Weibo Users In Public Opinion Reversal Events

Weibo as the representative of social media has become an important platform for people to express their opinions and emotions.Some topics and events that reflect social contradictions provoke netizens’ emotions easily.With the instantaneity of informational communication and the right of everyone to express opinion,the Public Opinion Reversal is inevitable.Without any guidance,it will not only aggravate the vicious development of public opinion under the group polarization,but also damage the credibility of both the government and the media.Furthermore,it will also lead to online and offline mass incidents,bringing social risks.However,previous studies mostly focused on the qualitative analysis,lacking theoretical depth,while empirical research from the perspective of emotion was seldom done.This paper based on the text mining and social network analysis of 20 cases of public opinion reversal in the year 2021,has trained the LSTM model to identify the emotion of each Weibo text to find out the characteristics and evolutional law.Then it has calculated the rational value based on the dictionary of CLIWC to analyze the rational expression of emotions to break the traditional thought that emotion is irrational.The findings are as follows: 1)Negative emotions,especially disgust and anger are dominant in public opinion reversal events.The comment area is full of emotions.The emotional distribution is influenced by the attributes of events.2)News reversal can hardly cause emotional reversal,and negative emotions are more likely to be contagious.And there are differences in spreading effect of emotional information among the behavior of post,reply,and repost.Besides,fear can easily lead to emotional fluctuation crisis.3)The rational expression of emotions is common,and it is easy to get better spread.The comment area has the highest degree of rationality,and the rational expression varies from different emotions.Based on these findings,this paper makes some suggestions on how to respond to Public Opinion Reversal from the emotional perspective: Firstly,the involved subjects should pay attention to equal emotional communication with the public and improve their ability to deal with public opinion;Secondly,Weibo has to optimize the content reward and punishment strategy to encourage the public to express emotions in a rational way.