Page 242 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

asserting one’s rights on Weibo is a convenient and flexible tool to offer the help for

citizens, while the right relief channel is blocked or invalidated in physical world. Tech-
nology, politics and civil rights resonated in the online public sphere – Weibo.

7.5.5 Problems of Weibo as the online public sphere

In the We Media age, one remarkable feature is that the public’s voice and influ-
ence has become increasingly visible (Shi, 2013). Because of the universality of Weibo,

it has highlighted the ‘grassroots’ feature which helps safeguard citizens’ rights in infor-
mation acquisition and dissemination. It breaks the restrictions of the traditional media
channels with its openness and wide acceptability of diversity. It brings much higher
speed and convenience to general users in terms of information acquisition, but also

generates an online platform with a pool of users of uneven quality, which leads to a
chaos in the distributed information. In addition to the rising phenomenon of fragment-
ed information, it sets a huge challenge in governing online content and public opinion.
One possible consequence is that any social event being disseminated on Weibo, no

matter whether it is fact or fake news, small or large, can have vast power with a chain
effect and influence the trend of public opinion (Mu, 2013). The containment of rumour
remains a profound challenge for the service provider.

Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology has col-
lected and analysed 9,079 rumours on Weibo from August 2011 to May 2013 (Liu et.
al., 2015). The category of rumours could be divided into 5 topic types: political, eco-
nomic, cheating, social living, and common sense. Political rumours and social living

rumours amounted to around 70%. Even though the common-sense rumours made up
only 10%, they were the ones which appeared repeatedly in the same or similar format.
Weibo, where some posts are automatically censored and the remaining ones

monitored by human censors, can be very effective. Approximately 30% of sensitive
posts are deleted within 30 minutes of publication, and after one day 90% have been
removed (Zhu et al., 2013). But unanticipated, sudden events leave censors no time to
prepare. In these cases, they can only react, and often only after an event has become

broadly known. The speed of publishing and distributing content on social media, and

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