New ThinkChina Analysis: Leading with Hearts and Mind: Emotion Contagion in China's Online Activism

Who are the prominent actors leading the diffusion of emotional messages in China’s online activism? What roles do they play in this process in an emotion-discouraging context?

In this exploratory study, Nian Lu, Department of Advertising, School of Culture and Communication, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing and Jun Liu, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, examine networked patterns of anger diffusion within the Red-Yellow-Blue kindergarten child abuse scandal on the Chinese social media Weibo. Using supervised machine learning for emotion labeling and a social network analysis approach, we identify three types of actors and profiled their distinctive roles in the process of anger contagion.

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