Research on the propagation and governance of public opinion information under the joint action of internal and external factors
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-02-2022-0065 |
| Published date | 20 July 2022 |
| Date | 20 July 2022 |
| Pages | 193-214 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
| Author | Jiakun Wang,Yun Li |
Research on the propagation and
governance of public opinion
information under the joint action
of internal and external factors
Jiakun Wang
College of Economics and Management,
Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China, and
Yun Li
College of Economics and Management,
Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China and
College of Foreign Languages, Shandong University of Science and Technology,
Qingdao, China
Abstract
Purpose –Under the new media environment, while enjoying the convenience brought by the propagation of
public opinion information (referred to as public opinion), learning the evolution process of public opinion and
strengthening the governance of the spreading of public opinion are of great significance to promoting economic
development and maintaining social stability as well as effectively resisting the negative impact of its propagation.
Design/methodology/approach –Thinking about the results of empirical research and bibliometric
analysis, this paper focused on introducing key factors such as information content, social strengthening
effects, etc., from both internal and external levels, dynamically designed public opinion spreading rules and
netizens’state transition probability. Subsequently, simulation experiments were conducted to discuss the
spreading law of public opinion in two types of online social networks and to identify the key factors which
influencing its evolution process. Based on the experimental results, the governance strategies for the
propagation of negative public opinion were proposed finally.
Findings –The results show that compared with other factors, the propagation of public opinion depends
more on the attributes of the information content itself. For the propagation of negative public opinion, on the
one hand, the regulators should adopt flexible guidance strategy to establish a public opinion supervision
mechanism and autonomous system with universal participation. On the other hand, they still need to adopt
rigid governance strategy, focusing on the governance timing and netizens with higher network status to
forestall the wide-diffusion of public opinion.
Practical implications –The research conclusions put forward the enlightenment for the governance of
public opinion in management practice, and also provided decision-making reference for the regulators to
reasonably respond to the propagation of public opinion.
Originality/value –Our research proposeda research framework for the discussion of public opinion propagation
process and had important practical guiding significance for the governance of public opinion propagation.
Keywords Public opinioninformation, Propagation, Online social networks, Internal factors, External factors,
Governance strategy
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
In the past two years, with the continuous expansion and innovation of artificial intelligence
applications in various countries, especially under the background of industrial
Public opinion
information
193
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51574157;
51474138; 71902105); Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2021QG035); Shandong
Province Social Science Planning Research Project (20CGLJ21). The authors would like to send their
sincere appreciation to the anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2050-3806.htm
Received 8 February 2022
Revised 6 April 2022
Accepted 21 May 2022
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 75 No. 2, 2023
pp. 193-214
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-02-2022-0065
transformation and the normalization of epidemic prevention, online social platforms (e.g.
Sina, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok) have become the most active place for information
propagation. According to the “2021 Global Digital Report”and “The 49th Statistical Report
on China’s Internet Development”, instant messaging is one of the fastest growing Internet
applications in 2021; and by Dec. 2021, the number of people using the internet worldwide has
grown to 5.22 billion, and global social media users have exceeded to a high of 4.66 billion
(Simon, 2021;CNNIC, 2022).
Under the era of artificial intelligence, as a form of social public opinion and the binding force
outside the ruling power, network public opinion information (referred to as public opinion) is
gradually formed with the popularity of the internet, and has become the main form for netizens to
obtain, transmit and participate in the interaction of social hot issues. For instance, the report of public
health events, the propagation of health information and the trend of epidemic public opinion at home
and abroad, have been arousing strong attention and drawing discussion in various fields of society.
While as the carrier of public opinion propagation, online social networks (OSN, including media
platform or mobile terminal) have shown a drastic change both in their form and structure, endowing
public opinion with unique propagation characteristics (Wongthongtham and Abu-Salih, 2018;
Meneghello et al.,2020), and it also puts forward new and higher requirements for the governance of
public opinion at the same time. It is undeniable that the echo room and information cocoon room
have narrowed the access for netizens to get information from the world, provided conditions for the
diffusion of negative and irrational voices, easily disrupting social order and threatening social
stability (Thelwall and Thelwall, 2020;Mandal et al., 2020). For example, during the COVID-19
outbreak, the news “Radix Isatidis showed effective inhibition in vitro for COVID-19”was interpret out
of context by some netizens, which seriously disrupted social order.
In view of this, considering the complexity of public opinion propagation under the new
media environment, this paper intends to systematically analyze the spreading process of
public opinion, extract key factors and identify the evolution law of public opinion, and then
provide countermeasures and suggestions for the propagation of negative public opinion in
OSN, so as to further achieve the goal of purifying cyberspace.
2. Literature review
In the context of the prevalent new media, the propagation of public opinion in OSN has
received continuous attention from academia and management practices for its significant
impact on economic development and social stability. The evolution law of public opinion has
a close relationship with its governance, at the same time, the non-replicable of its spreading
process also brings great challenges to academic research. So, analyzing the evolution
process of public opinion and constructing its spreading model are the basic work of public
opinion propagation and governance research. According to the results of bibliometric
analysis of relevant literature, it is found that at present, scholars have carried out academic
research on public opinion mainly from the following three aspects.
The first is the research on the identification of influencing factors. The
propagation of public opinion mainly depends on netizens’spreading behavior, which has
strong randomness and uncertainty. And the social relationship among netizens, the public
opinion content, the disturbance of external environment also will affect its propagation
process. Based on bibliometric analysis, the influencing factors can be summarized into two
levels with four aspects: internal (diversity of netizens’attributes, differences in information
content) and external (complexity of network structure, disturbance of the external
environment). At the internal level, compared with ordinary netizens, public opinion
forwarded by netizens with higher network status, such as opinion leaders and authoritative
users, tends to have a faster spreading speed and wider diffusion scale (Newman, 2001;Wang
et al., 2019); based on the keywords clustering results, both Katsyri et al. (2016) and Yan and
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