Newsification in Weibo Hot Search Topics?

The second day at IAMCR 2024 starts with Jingxuan Gao, whose interest is in news on Weibo. She describes this as the newsification of social media, as the platform is becoming more important as a source of news for Chinese users. Weibo is broadly similar to Twitter, with some 598 million monthly active users.

Central to Weibo is Weibo Hot Search, which offers a list of trending topics on the platform and often packages entertainment information and soft news into a form of more serious news – newsifying them. This can be linked to the concept of infotainment, and may be explored further with reference to framing theory.

Weibo Hot Search can be studied through a mixed-methods approach, scraping content and metadata from the Hot Search list over a period of two months in December, identifying the most popular Hot Search topics, and manually coding them for their content.

This found that content from corporate and government officials, containing factual statements, providing detailed explanations, and featuring multimedia elements was most prominent. This represents an implicit newsification, blurring the boundaries of what is news on social media; it increases focus on entertainment information and soft news, and reducing attention to hard news.