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Who post more negatively on social media? A large-scale sentiment analysis of Weibo users

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Abstract

Negative behaviours on social media have been widely researched in cyberpsychology studies. However, studies using actual usage data are still limited, especially for the Chinese social media Weibo. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between Weibo users’ actual usage and negative online behaviours. We located 2463 Weibo users who had posted highly negative posts after screening 10,483,628 comments under nine trending topics. Their publicly visible usage data were collected and 4,273,442 microblogs (including 234,379 original posts) were analysed using sentiment analysis. Results show that the users’ percentage of negative posts was positively correlated with their number of posts, number of followers, number of followings and Weibo account levels. The majority (94.84%) of the 2463 negative comment releasers did not frequently post negative microblogs; less than 50% of their total original posts were negative. Women posted more negatively than men. The present study contributes to the understanding of Weibo users’ negative posting behaviours. More investigations are needed for the reasons for negative behaviours on social media and the approaches of predicting negative online behaviours from general usage data.

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Funding

The present study was funded by the Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China under grant number 21YJCZH200; Social Science Youth Foundation of Jiangsu Province under grant number 21XWC005, High level personnel (Shuang chuang) project of Jiangsu Province under grant number JSSCBS20210698; Soochow University under grant number 21XM1004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, School of Education, Soochow University, Suzhou, China

    Zeyang Yang & Wenting Xu

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  1. Zeyang Yang
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  2. Wenting Xu
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Correspondence to Zeyang Yang.

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This study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Psychology, School of Education, Soochow University.

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Yang, Z., Xu, W. Who post more negatively on social media? A large-scale sentiment analysis of Weibo users. Curr Psychol 42, 25270–25278 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03616-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03616-8

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