Analysis on the Influence of Water Army on Public Opinion on the Internet

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211120.131How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Social media; water army; public opinion; theory of The Spiral of Silence

Abstract

Water army is a kind of employed netizens which appear most in some hot-trend topics to oriented other netizens’ opinion to these specific topics. Therefore, it has also gradually led to the uncertainty of people’s orientation to public opinion. Weibo, as one of the most commonly used new media among Chinese netizens, and a new public opinion-making tool. The “Cyber Water Army” has been lurking around people, deliberately guiding people’s views on hot-button events. Such actions of the Water army may cover up the fact of some social events due to the capital power taken by some entertainment companies and also prevent Weibo’s communication of freedom as a social media. Therefore, many “The Spiral of Silence” phenomenon appear on Weibo and lead to the unbalanced social contact power between normal netizens and Water army. This paper discussed the influence of people from “network water army” and took the “network water army” which appeared on Weibo as the main research object. According to the research on the data of Chinese netizens structure and the real examples of some cases and social events caused by water army, basically concluded how the water army brings negative influence to the network society and how to use the spiral of silence to achieve its purpose.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xu Jiaze
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/11/29
TI  - Analysis on the Influence of Water Army on Public Opinion on the Internet
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 718
EP  - 722
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211120.131
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211120.131
ID  - Jiaze2021
ER  -