Page 229 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 7. The Yihuang incident

Every micro-blog user can follow others or be followed, so they are both the

information receiver and the publisher. Once released, any information can be auto-
matically displayed on all their followers’ pages in the first instance; once there is a
retransmission or comment created, all of their followers can also receive the real-time
information. Information transmission on Weibo follows the ‘geometric multiplication’
rule, but in the process, no one can decide what kind of dissemination can be or cannot

be most widely spread, because this will be a joint decision made by all participants.
Even if the original thread was censored or deleted, the retransmitted ones are still there
for the participants to forward or comment.

The key turning point of the Yihuang case was the live-broadcast through Weibo.
It amplified the issue, created awareness and evoked enormous response from neti-
zens. Opinion leaders such as Murong Xuecun and Deng Fei played a vital role in the
retransmission and spread of information. Generally speaking, opinion leaders are ce-
lebrities and have a considerable number of followers on Weibo (Jiang, 2012). Thanks

to the special transmission mechanism of Weibo, more netizens learned the news in
real-time.
Deng Fei is a journalist on Phoenix Weekly, but he preferred Weibo as the com-

munication platform because he thought the magazine was weaker on timeliness
compared with the network (Jiang, 2012). Deng Fei attributed the rapid spread of his
live-broadcast to the large number of subscribers on his Weibo account; however, he
perceived the ‘airport blocking’ incident itself as a more important trigger:
‘Firstly, there was obvious conflict, and live-broadcast threads represented an un-

even fight between weak women and the authoritarian government. So, women
retransmit this to support their female compatriots; common people retransmit this
as vulnerable groups to express their discontent with strong power’ (Jiang, 2012,

p.136), Deng explained.
In the Yihuang case, Weibo served not only as the platform for information dis-
semination, but also the channel for the victims to appeal for their interests. It acted as
a tool that carried the appeal for help and the space that formed public opinion. Because
of the features discussed earlier, Weibo manifests a new form of supervision by public

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