Emotional Expression of Weibo Users in China during the COVID-19

Abstract

Emotion, as an essential element in communication, is becoming increasingly important and influential in the era of social media. The expression of social media users also has more and more emotional characteristics. Based on the framework of emotional expression, this study encodes the collected 49 microblogs published by China’s official media accounts and their comments during COVID-19, and discusses the relationship between account types, text forms, discussion intensity and emotional expression tendency. It is found that account types and discussion intensity have a correlation with the emotional expression of Weibo users, while the correlation between text forms and emotional expression is not obvious. This study analyzes the emotional expression of social media and reflects on how to correctly understand the phenomenon of emotional expression and avoid the occurrence of “post-truth” events.