Leading with hearts and minds: emotion contagion in China's online activism.

Who are the prominent actors leading the diffusion of emotional messages in China's online activism? What roles do they play in this process in an emotion-discouraging context? In this exploratory study, we examine networked patterns of anger diffusion within the Red-Yellow-Blue kindergarten child a...

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Published in:Social Movement Studies Vol. 22; no. 5/6; pp. 728 - 751
Main Authors: Liu, Nian, Liu, Jun
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd Sep-Nov2023
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Sep-Nov2023
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        10.1080/14742837.2021.2011716
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        atl: Leading with hearts and minds: emotion contagion in China's online activism.
      aug:
        au:
          Liu, Nian
          Liu, Jun
        affil:
          Department of Advertising, School of Culture and Communication, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, People's Republic of China
          Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
      su:
        China
        Activism
        Emotions
        Social network analysis
        Child abuse
        Supervised learning
        Kindergarten children
      sug:
        subj:
          Activism
          Emotions
          Social network analysis
          Child abuse
          China
          Supervised learning
          Kindergarten children
      keyword:
        activism
        anger
        Emotion contagion
        social network analysis
        Weibo
        activism
        anger
        Emotion contagion
        social network analysis
        Weibo
      ab: Who are the prominent actors leading the diffusion of emotional messages in China's online activism? What roles do they play in this process in an emotion-discouraging context? In this exploratory study, we examine networked patterns of anger diffusion within the Red-Yellow-Blue kindergarten child abuse scandal on the Chinese social media Weibo. Using supervised machine learning for emotion labeling and a social network analysis approach, we identified three types of actors and profiled their distinctive roles in the process of anger contagion. Broadcasters (e.g., verified organization accounts) act as both an information source and a legitimate source to elicit other users' emotion through emotion-free information. Furthermore, emotion initiators like celebrities instigate and lead other users' emotions, while emotion brokers like micro-celebrities build bridges between different subgroups to form a massive-scale network of emotion contagion. These actors are indispensable and complement each other for emotion contagion in China. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings on the understanding of emotion diffusion in online activism.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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      src: R
    language: English
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