The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Shuo Li, whose interest is in the framing of cyberviolence on social media in China. Such cyberviolence has been on the rise on platforms like Weibo, and is disproportionately directed at women and vulnerable groups; it includes insults, defamation, rumours, and privacy violations.
How do Weibo users themselves frame such phenomena? Are there differences between ordinary and influential accounts, and between posts with high and low interactivity? Do group polarisation and discursive power play a role?
This study works with some 161,000 Weibo posts containing the term cyberviolence (in Chinese). Topic modelling of these posts produces a number of distinct themes in these debates; this is valuable for surfacing different perspectives.
Common frames that emerge from this are the condemnation of cyberviolence; personal victim narratives; and calls for morality and legal accountability. These posts also position the problem and moral and urgent. Discussion around ordinary users tends to focus on victim narratives; influential users receive a more legal and structural framing. Celebrity victims dominate the discourse, revealing structural imbalances and digital injustice. Influencial users thereby play a gatekeeping role in shaping discourse. It remains to be seen whether these patterns are similar on platforms other than Weibo, though.
