Who is leading China's family planning policy discourse in Weibo? A social media text mining analysis

Abstract

The advent of digital social media in China has altered our understanding of who sets the policy agenda and forms public opinion. Using text mining analysis of more than 74,000 Weibo user comments (over 4 million words) on 6 years' worth of The People's Daily media coverage, this study investigates social media interactions on family planning policy issues between the state-run news media and individual users in China. Our analysis demonstrates that Weibo postings about the topic by government-run news networks and comments by the general public are affecting each other, but also presenting partially reverse or bottom-up agenda-setting effects. Through latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) modeling, we identified major latent topic sets (women's right to work, family culture/ tradition, law/regulation, and social welfare/wellbeing) and found that Weibo users' main concerns on China's family planning have changed over time. We also found that gender differences affect the topics of commenters.

Public Employee Use of Social Media at Work: Competency, Collaboration, and Communication of Workplace Policy

“…Social media platforms and new technologies have brought about capabilities previously unavailable to government organizations (Deng et al, 2021; Williams et al, 2018), changing the landscape of public sector agencies and government bureaucracies (Criado et al, 2013; Kavanaugh et al, 2012). According to Leftheriotis and Giannakos (2014), employees’ motivations for using social media at work include creating and strengthening ties with colleagues and customers, maintaining external professional networks, gathering professional information, people sensemaking, and promoting knowledge sharing and resources, all of which align with our survey results.…”

Contextualization: A Path to Chinese Traditional News Media’s Integration Into Social Media

“…Zhang and Lei (2013) argued that the opening of @Peoplesdaily signaled that the CPC's official newspaper was presenting the features of commercial media, and to some extent, it had diluted the color of its political ideology and achieved communication with netizens. Over the subsequent 10 years, many scholars have studied the news published by @Peoplesdaily from different perspectives, aiming to analyze the innovation strategies of traditional news media in the social media era (Deng et al, 2021). Most of these existing studies analyzed communication strategies in the context of specific events or topics, with small sample sizes and mainly cross-sectional surveys (Huang & Wang, 2013).…”

Human Resources Analytics for Public Personnel Management: Concepts, Cases, and Caveats

“…In order to address these concerns, it is important for organizations to have clear policies and processes in place to protect employee privacy and ensure that the data collection and analysis is conducted in an ethical manner. Another source of sentiments data is social media, where employees may express their opinions and experiences informally (Gelbard et al 2018;Deng et al 2021). While this can provide valuable insights, it is important to consider the potential for misinformation in this type of data (Drage and Mackereth 2022).…”