Cross-group or within-group attention flow? Exploring the amplification process among elite users and social media publics in Sina Weibo

摘要

As one of the most important forms of communicative behavior, retweeting enhances the importance or visibility of a particular object in social media. Conceptualizing retweeting as a process of amplification, this study examines how attention to a particular set of issues may be increased by the actions of verified users or social media publics on the largest Chinese microblogging website, Sina Weibo. The Granger-causality test was applied to analyze the sequential linkage between original posts and retweets by different user groups across days 1 to 14. The results show that verified users' original posts on unobtrusive issues triggered related retweets only in their own network, while social media publics' original posts on both unobtrusive and obtrusive issues triggered related retweets within their own group. In addition, the results demonstrate that amplification of different types of issue exhibits systematically different temporalities, that is, the response to obtrusive issues is more immediate and ephemeral than that response to unobtrusive issues. The findings highlight the possibilities and limitations of grassroots empowerment through social media in China, and provide meso-level evidence about the complex issue of attention flows in social media - whether bottom-up or top-down.