From panic to banter: How do routine government releases and clarifications cause unexpected public opinion crisis—An analysis of public opinion toward a release by Chinese Ministry of Commerce encouraging the storage of necessities

Abstract

This research explored why a routine government notice caused a series of unexpected public opinion crises. We used K-means clustering and Baidu Application Programming Interface Gateway to analyse 12,478 comments from Sina Weibo on Chinese Ministry of Commerce's release to encourage people to stock up necessities. Results show that even government's routine notice releases are regular events with relatively low objective risk, but in practice, how the government releases information and makes clarification would significantly infect public risk perception and emotion. First, ambiguous government releases magnify existing risks, especially during sensitive times, and resulting in heightened uncertainty, public risk perception and spread of negative emotions, therefore, lead to heated public discussion. Second, timely and effective clarifications can lower public risk perception as well as lead to positive emotions, although public banter may come along and generate another round of online public opinion within a short time. Our work answers why regular events would cause unexpected public opinion from the perspective of government behaviour, illustrates the dynamic interaction between government and online public opinion and can inform public policy aimed at more efficient communication with the public.