Proposed SNA on Sina Weibo

Jacob Fromer
Proposed SNA Blog Entry
Planning to Audit Second Module

Research Question: How does information about an underreported foreign political event spread through China's microblogs?

China's microblogs, like Twitter and other similar services around the world, are often cited as an example of the Internet's potential to liberate societies from state-level information control. To investigate this assumption, I am proposing a social network analysis of users of Sina Weibo -- China's biggest microblogging service -- who engage in discussion about international relations issues. China's censorship apparatus is powerful, especially when the topic is political; I want to understand how information spreads within this system.

In one case, last year, discussion of the presidential election in Taiwan -- the self-governing island that China considers a rebel province -- used different vocabulary from the state media. For example, Chinese Netizens referred to Taiwan's leader as a "president" in increasing numbers, despite the fact that this term is avoided in any official discussion in China about Taiwan. Who "brought" this term to Weibo, and who helped spread it? Did people "learn" this term from other Weibo users?

In another case, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing began releasing local pollution data on a Twitter feed (Twitter is blocked in China but can be accessed with special software). Despite the Embassy's use of technical vocabulary (i.e. "PM2.5") to describe the air quality, and despite the Twitter blackout, the information spread across Beijing to the point that it outraged the public and caused the government to announce that it would change how it monitors its own air. So how did this information make the jump from Twitter to Weibo, and how did it spread through Weibo? Were a group of well-connected, environmentally-minded nodes responsible for this?

This study will be tedious because it will involve finding a timely international relations issue and tracking who is spreading the information to whom, and whether those receivers of the information are "retweeting" it themselves.

Sina Weibo has more capacity for dialogue than Twitter does because every post has an option for comments, just like Facebook. This may be another useful tool for understanding who is involved in these political discussions and how.

I'm looking forward to doing this analysis and applying it to my thesis!