The redefinition of a Chinese sports hero's public image: evidence from the reactions on Chinese social media to Sun Yang's international trial by Tang-Yun Leng, Shuo Yang, Alan Bairner

“…This study traces the metamorphosis of Chinese Olympic swimming champion Sun Yang’s public image from a national sports hero to an ordinary individual on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. …”
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我国足球归化运动员社会认同问题研究：基于社交媒体内容的 情感与主题分析 (The social identity of naturalized footballers in China: social media contents based sentiment and thematic analysis)... by Tangyun Leng, Alan Bairner, Jiashu Hu, Shuo Yang

“…The paper explores the social identity of naturalized footballers in China by analyzing replies extracted from the relevant trending topics on Weibo in a diachronic manner. A mixed-method examination of these replies through manually annotated sentiment analysis and theme extraction reveals that: 1) Sentiments about the social identity of naturalized footballers polarize significantly, among which negative emotions being more intense than positive ones; 2) sentiments toward different players are quite diversified; 3) sentiments change markedly from negative to positive over time; 4) “nation and ancestry”, “acculturation and integration” and “competitive level”are the three most discussed themes of online conversations about naturalized players.…”
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CasGCN: Predicting future cascade growth based on information diffusion graph by Zhixuan Xu, Minghui Qian, Xiaowei Huang, Jie Meng

“…Sudden bursts of information cascades can lead to unexpected consequences such as extreme opinions, changes in fashion trends, and uncontrollable spread of rumors. …”
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Experiences of contemporary Chinese queer individuals: images of physical and online lives by Siya Zhou

“…This study selected Weibo, China's largest social platform, as a virtual observation site to study how the queer group can express and socialize on such a virtual platform. …”
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