Emotional Polarisation on Weibo Following the Guangzhou Subway Secret Photography Incident

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yunfang Cui, addressing public debate about the ‘secret photography’ incident on the Guangzhou subway in 2023, where a middle-aged man secretly photographed young female travellers. The discussion of this incident on Weibo can be seen as an example of group polarisation.

This may be aided by the anonymity and algorithmic shaping of social media feeds. To examine this, this study gathered some 5,000 posts and 67,000 reposts from Weibo about this incident, and found strong engagement in the early days after the event, with decline in activity after a few days. Key themes in the initial debate included social morality, gender, education, law and rights, and media and communication discussions; later on this moved to apology and forgiven news, employment, punishment, emotional polarisation, and social justice; and eventually the themes of employment, social morality, gender, and emotional polarisation remained.

Group emotional polarisation between participants remained fairly stable, with strongly positive as well as negative comments amid fewer neutral posts. A network mapping showed a dense centre of the discussion in the earlier stages, with such networks gradually resolving in the later stage. Clusters in this network point to the presence of polarisation between the different groups.