Multidimensional influencing factors of public opinion information dissemination in social media: Evidence from Weibo dataset

Abstract

The factors influencing the dissemination of public opinion on social media, the main carrier of public opinion, are diverse, complex and changeable. Existing studies of influential factors of public opinion dissemination focus on the information itself and information sources in the dissemination process, failing to consider the comprehensive influence of multidimensional factors, such as information content, sources and channels. This study takes the identification of multidimensional influential factors of social media information dissemination as the research object and comprehensively sorts out the influencing factors of public opinion. To improve the scientific basis and accuracy of the research, multidimensional factors, including information characteristics, dissemination network structure and user-level attributes, are selected to analyze the effect of influential factors in different dimensions on the dissemination of social media public opinion information using econometric models. Three main conclusions of this paper are as follows: (1) The traditional information characteristics (information content) and information source attributes (user-level factor) are not the only key factors affecting information dissemination, while the information channel (network structure) is worth more consideration. (2) Netizens tend to pay more attention to the psychological and emotional attributes of information when forwarding public opinions. The communication mode in which offline social elites enlighten the public no longer exists; whether a user is a network celebrity or lives in the central area no longer significantly affects public opinion dissemination. (3) The higher the total amount of information users release, the more the information would interfere with the public opinion. This is mainly because users with a higher level of activity may release more invalid information about advertising that has nothing to do with public opinion events.