Information Cocoons on Sina Weibo?

The final presenter in this IAMCR 2023 session is Junjun Yu, whose focus is on information cocoons on Sina Weibo. Such cocoons are theorised as close-off spaces where information circulates in an ideologically and informationally homogeneous environment, potentially facilitated by the algorithms and affordances of social media platforms.

Such information cocoons could be identified based on the homogeneity of their selection, their content, or their participants; the present study focusses on the content, in the context of Sina Weibo. It examines the degree of content homogeneity for each user; the posts by a user on the platform; the top information cocoon; and the public degree of users (sorry, not really sure what some of these mean).

The study examined some 2,100 randomly selected Sina Weibo users, and explored 300 randomly selected posts by these users between 2017 and 2019. It then somehow compared these posts to what it calls ‘public information’. (I’m afraid the methodology here is not at all clear, sorry.) The conclusion from this is that users may be in a ‘public cage’ that constrains the informational environments they find themselves in.