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The new element in governance is social media. Inexorably, its fertile networks of shared information shift power from authorities to citizens and amateurs, including to the "unknown" experts in the "dorm rooms and edges of society" who drive innovation.Tweets may bust trust and undermine authority, but can social media also be a tool for building consensus through deliberation and negotiation among interests? When it comes to governance, is crowd‐sourcing any better than populism at generating collective intelligence instead of disruptive "dumb mobs?" Can networks aid the self‐administration of society, or does that take institutions with governing authority?In this section, leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technologists and network theorists from Google, Microsoft and the MIT Media Lab join with political scientist Francis Fukuyama and top thinkers from Asia to address these issues.

It appears that nationalism has been on the rise in China in recent years, particularly among online communities. Scholars agree that the Chinese government is facing pressure from online nationalistic and pro-democracy forces; however, it is believed that of the two, nationalistic views are the more dominant. Online nationalism is believed to have pushed the Chinese government to be more aggressive in diplomacy. This study challenges this conventional wisdom by finding that online political discourse is not dominated by nationalistic views, but rather by anti-regime sentiments. Even when there is an outpouring of nationalist sentiment, it may be accompanied by pro-democracy views that criticize the government. By analysing more than 6,000 tweets from 146 Chinese opinion leaders on Weibo, and by decomposing nationalistic discussion by specific topic, this study shows that rather than being monolithically xenophobic, nationalists may have differing sets of views regarding China's supposed rivals. Rather than being supportive of the regime, nationalists may incorporate liberal values to challenge the government. Nonetheless, this liberal dominance appears to provoke a backlash of nationalism among certain groups. (China Q/GIGA)

As with many spheres of public life, public diplomatic communication is being transformed by the boom of social media. More than 165 foreign governmental organisations in China have embarked on the use of Weibo (a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter in China) to engage with Chinese citizens and reach out to youth populations, one of the major goals of current public diplomacy efforts. This exciting new pivot, based on systemic research of Weibo usage by embassies in China, explores the challenges and the limits that the use of Chinese Weibo (and Chinese social media in general) poses for foreign embassies, and considers ways to use these or other tools. It offers a systematic study of the effectiveness and challenges of using Weibo for public diplomatic communication in and with China. Addressing the challenges of e-diplomacy, it considers notably the occurrence of cyber-nationalism on Weibo and encourages a critical look at its practice, arguing how it can contribute to the goals of public diplomacy.

The Chinese government has expanded the use of social media to communicate information about government affairs in the Web 2.0 era. This study aims to examine the sources who posted the Chinese government's messages on Weibo and WeChat, the focus of their posts, and Chinese netizens' responses to the posts. The issue of the Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang's death during the Covid-19 pandemic was selected. A census sample of 431 Weibo posts and reposts, 145 WeChat articles, and 27,094 comments were analyzed by using qualitative content analysis. The results revealed that media organizations had more influence than the authorities in communicating the government's messages. They were the dominant sources to forward government press releases, and posting positive commentaries about government actions. This study also found that there were almost equal positive and negative responses from netizens, whose comments reflect a diversity of opinions. Based on Schramm's interactive model of communication and the theory of mediatized politics, this study filled the research gap by considering the Chinese government as an active communicator who receives the public's messages and gives feedback.

ln recent tour years, Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, has attracted more than 500 million users. Since 2013, nearly 20 provinces in China begin to live webcast in trial through tweeting from court. Connected by online social media, users partcipate and interacI extensively and deeply. How does the political communication enhance formation-sharing and promote the social consensus? First this paper reveals that interaclive among users, on one hand, contributes to generating and sharing different contents on the other hand, variety, conflict and decentralization make the communication more inştable and uncertain. Moreover the data of the study are hundreds of tweets from Weibo and reports from newspapers, radio and television.

Microblogs, epitomized by Twitter in the West and Weibo in China, have attracted considerable attention over the past few years. There have been a number of optimistic accounts about their potential to stimulate political activism and social change, juxtaposed with suggestions that their networks are too weak and that they are too easily censored for such change to occur. Yet, in this debate, little attention has been paid to the medium itself; microblogs have too often been treated as mere conduits for information, and the practical and aesthetic experience of microblogging has been marginalized.This article addresses this imbalance in two ways. First, it argues that the microblog is a distinctive medium with special potential for political communication. It applies Rancière's 'politics of aesthetics' and Baudrillard's 'private telematics' to microblogs, suggesting that the particularly immersive quality of microblogs provides new and distinct opportunities for the promotion of opinions and social movements. Second, it argues that by allowing, re-modelling, monitoring and censoring the Weibo service, the Chinese party-state, acting collaboratively with the key microblog companies and the market as a whole, is consciously manipulating the medium of the microblog to reduce the risk of activism, controversial use, and network formation. Thus, the medium of Weibo differs from other microblogs – of which Twitter is the key example – in several important ways, each of which, the article argues, are intended to maximize the cacophonous spectacle of entertainment and to minimize reasoned discussion and debate. Furthermore, while pure censorship of information can be evaded in many ways, it is more difficult for dissenters to evade state control when it is applied to the medium itself.

Facebook, Twitter und Google bieten die zentrale Architektur für politische Debatten. Doch Microtargeting, die zunehmende "Messengerisierung" unserer digitalen Kommunikation und polarisierende Algorithmen führen dazu, dass wir immer mehr in unseren eigenen politischen Realitäten leben. Verschiedene Autoren analysieren die wachsende Bedeutung von Social Media für den politischen Diskurs. Sie präsentieren Strategien und Lösungsansätze und stellen zukunftsträchtige Technologien der digitalen Demokratie vor. Mit Beiträgen von Ingrid Brodnig, Sarah Bütikofer, Adrienne Fichter, Martin Fuchs, Daniel Graf, Dirk Helbing, Anna Jobin, Stefan Klauser, Colin Porlezza, Adrian Rauchfleisch, Mike S. Schäfer, Robin S. Schwarz und Thomas Willi

In the light of Huizinga's conceptualisation of play and Bakhtinian carnival theory, this article exemplifies the ludic-carnivalesque qualities of female masochism on China's social media. Arguably, the joint venture of play and carnival frameworks allows a de-pathological account of female masochism under the male gaze and a reclaiming of the feminist agenda through the critical reading of abusive texts in the pan-entertaining digital era. Thus, the study fills a gap regarding non-sexual female masochistic pleasure in the literature of feminist studies. The article has found billingsgate language, or the language of marketplace, a fertile ground to investigate patriarchy and objectification. It contends that billingsgate language, which hails a ludic-carnivalesque exposure of present patriarchal biases against women and imbalanced gender power relations, is pregnant with a power of deconstruction that overturns present social orders in favour of gender equalities.

Abstract. With the process of urbanization in China, the urban waterlogging caused by rainstorms occurs frequently and often leads to serious damage to
the natural environment, human life, and the city economy. Rapid detection of rainstorm and urban waterlogging disasters is an essential step to minimize
these losses. Weibo, a popular microblog service in China, can provide many real-time Weibo posts for rapid detection. In this paper, we propose a
method to identify microblogs with rainstorm and waterlogging information and apply them to waterlogging risk assessment. After pre-processing the
microblog texts, we evaluate the performance of clustering (k-means) and classification (support vector machine, SVM) algorithms in the
classification task. Apart from word vector features, we also introduce sentiment and publisher features for more real-time and accurate
results. Furthermore, we build a waterlogging intensity dictionary to assess the waterlogging risk from the Weibo texts and produce a risk map with
ArcGIS. To examine the efficacy of this approach, we collect Weibo data from two rainstorms and waterlogging disasters in Beijing city as examples. The results
indicate that the SVM algorithm can be applied for a real-time rainstorm and waterlogging information detection. Compared to official-authentication and personal-certification users, the microblogs posted by general users can better indicate the intensity and timing of rainstorms. The
location of waterlogging points is consistent with the risk assessment results, which proves our proposed risk assessment method can be used as a
reference for timely emergency response.

This study conducted a controlled experiment to examine the impact of posters' IP disclosure on the perceptions of Weibo users with different habits and information preferences and explore whether such disclosure facilitates the fight against disinformation or deepens cognitive biases. Results showed that the IP location of the information poster does influence users' judgments of the authenticity of the information and that the consistency between users' long-term residence and poster IP is not important for users to make judgments about the credibility of information. The high level of usage of Weibo also has no effect on users' judgment of the credibility of the information, and this may be related to the small difference in college students' overall use of Weibo. The results also showed that users' perceptions of information's accuracy, logical coherence, absence of bias, alignment with their own views, consistency with the majority opinion, and trustworthiness of its source are all statistically positively correlated with the overall credibility of information.