As one of the most popular social media platforms in China, Sina Weibo has created an environment for the Chinese people to share opinions and post information on events they have witnessed. Thus, Weibo users can be citizen journalists, though most of them have played the role unconsciously. Although Weibo has existed for about six years, citizen journalism is still new to most Chinese people. Some scholars have studied Weibo from the perspective of public opinion or better governance rather than from its ethical demands and influence. This paper discusses the ethical problems of citizen journalism that arose in three case studies where Weibo posts were immediate sources of news and information on disasters and were considered important by mainstream media and the public, but where the posts also provided false information. In addition, a survey found that most Chinese respondents had posted news or information on Weibo, but very few consider themselves citizen journalists. Surprisingly, non-journalists are no more likely to trust citizen journalism than are journalists. Non-journalists are getting more news from citizen journalism on Weibo about national disasters, but they put more trust and credibility in mainstream media. Respondents thought witnessing events and quickly reporting on them were the biggest advantages of citizen journalists, while the biggest problems were bias, emotional reports, rumor and invasion of privacy. About two-thirds of respondents think self-restraint is the best way to handle ethical problems resulting from citizen journalists, but about half favor more legislation. In a striking difference from Western expectations, a relatively small percentage of Chinese respondents think independence from the government is an important journalistic value. Finally, the paper concludes that the public sphere concept is relevant in China in the wake economic reforms and the advent of social media. And it argues that the theory of existential journalism may offer an ethical guide for China’s citizen journalists by emphasizing both freedom and personal responsibility. Finally it suggests that mainstream media, journalists and media scholars play the main role of promoting journalistic ethical values on Weibo.

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This thesis analyzes the presentation of organ donation organization on Weibo. This study used content analysis to find out the Love.Hope organ donation organization’s main content of Weibo’s content. The main content includes six themes. The theme of popularizing organ donation knowledge is the majority. Through analyzing the correlation of content of each themes with shares, likes, and comments. It is concluded that people are more inclined to engage with Weibo posts with popularization of organ donation knowledge and stories of organ donors and recipients, and people also concern about the organ supply and demand situation in China. It turns out that in China, knowledge about organ donation is still scarce, which may be one of the reasons for low donation rate. The organ donation organizations also tend to publish positive information or stories and people’s approval of this kind of information will also make a positive impression on organ donation. However, there are still lots of factors are restricting the development of organ donation in China. Our social media still has a long way to go in helping people to build up their values of organ donation.

Problematisation Previous study has indicated that social media is an effective marketing tool. Moreover, Weibo, a Chinese social network contains large potential for the companies. However little theoretical guidance exists on what are the key features of Weibo marketing. Purpose and research question The purpose of this study contributes to a better understanding of the social media by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of Weibo for Western companies that expect to launch a successful marketing strategy. Methodology This research is done through qualitative approach and is of an abductive nature . It uses a case-study methodology and relying on empirical data and theoretical conceptions. The main empirical findings are based on collection of 13 personal  interviews. Results and conclusion The result of this paper contributed to deep understanding of Weibo marketing. Therefore, the theoretical guideline in form of model has been developed and includes 8  key features (4 advantages and 4 disadvantages) that should be considered by Western companies in order to apply successful marketing strategy on Weibo.

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Nous proposons de concevoir et développer un outil permettant d’analyser la diffusion d’information sur les services de réseaux sociaux en ligne grâce au traitement et à la visualisation de données. Fruit d’une réflexion méthodologique, ce dispositif permet d’observer les relations entre les dimensions conversationnelles, sémantiques, temporelles et géographiques des actes de communication en ligne. Courts messages se propageant rapidement sur la Toile selon des modèles encore mal connus, les mèmes Internet comptent parmi les contenus les plus prisés sur les plate-formes web. Les mèmes Internet circulant sur le service de microblog chinois Sina Weibo articulent notamment discussions personnelles, débats sociétaux et vastes campagnes médiatiques. Mobilisant des méthodes issues de l’analyse des réseaux et du traitement automatisé de la langue chinoise, nous procédons à l’analyse d’un vaste corpus de 200 millions de messages représentant l’activité sur Sina Weibo durant l’année 2012. Notre première tâche consiste à identifier des mèmes dans ce large ensemble de données. L’identification de mèmes dans un ensemble de messages est notamment possible grâce à un algorithme de détection non supervisé. Néanmoins, le volume de calculs nécessaires pour obtenir des résultats fiables sur un large corpus nous amène à abandonner cette approche, montrant par là-même la complexité d’une définition intéressante de l’objet numérique composite mème. Notre seconde série d’analyses porte sur le volume de conversations entourant les hashtags du corpus. Les résultats montrent que les usages majoritaires de Sina Weibo sont similaires à ceux des médias traditionnels (publicité, divertissement, loisirs...). Néanmoins, nous écartons les hashtags comme représentants des mèmes Internet, artefacts d’usages commerciaux et stratégiques à la diffusion cadrée et planifiée. L’approche finalement retenue utilise la recherche par mots-clés pour constituer les corpus de messages décrivant une dizaine de mèmes sélectionnés dans la littérature académique et secondaire pour leurs intentions diverses : humour, actualité, scandale politique, faits divers et marketing promotionnel. S’inspirant de la critique des schémas théoriques de communication, une analyse des mots et des réseaux d’échanges entre utilisateurs met à jour les dynamiques discursives de chaque mème. L’organisation de ces informations selon un axe temporel dans un espace de visualisation interactif autorise une lecture détaillée de leur diffusion. La projection de ces réseaux conversationnels et lexicaux sur des cartes géographiques montre également les relations entre leurs aspects textuels et actuels. Les figures obtenues permettent d’ébaucher une typologie structurelle de la diffusion de ces contenus, montrant comment différents régimes d’expression cohabitent sur les réseaux sociaux. La tension entre énonciation et discours qui régit les plateformes Web se manifeste dans des motifs particuliers de circulation des contenus en ligne. Nous pouvons ainsi formuler des recommandations pour l’analyse et la conception de stratégies de communication en ligne d’organismes tant privés que publics. Néanmoins, le caractère exploratoire de cette étude et la difficulté de comprendre les actions humaines par une simple analyse de données nous invite à refuser une généralisation a priori des résultats, préférant considérer ce travail comme la première validation d’une méthodologie pouvant être étendue à d’autres formes de conversations en ligne. / We develop a data mining and visualisation toolkit to study how the information is shared on online social network services. This software allows to observe relationships between conversational, semantical, temporal and geographical dimensions of online communication acts. Internet memes are short messages that spread quickly through the Web. Following models that remain largely unknown, they articulate personal discussions, societal debates and large communication campaign. We analyse a set of Internet memes by using methods from social network analysis and Chinese natural language processing on a large corpus of 200 million tweets which represents/reflects the overall activity on the Chinese social network Sina Weibo in 2012. An interactive visualisation interface showing networks of words, user exchanges and their projections on geographical maps provides a detailed understanding of actual and textual aspects of each meme spread. An analysis of hashtags in the corpus shows that the main content from Sina Weibo is largely similar to the ones in traditional media (advertisement, entertainment, etc.). Therefore, we decided to not consider hashtags as memes representatives, being mostly byproducts of wellplanned strategic or marketingcampaigns. Our final approach studies a dozen of memes selected for the diversity of their topic: humor, political scandal, breaking news and marketing.

Social media continues to serve as vehicles for fostering relationships with customers. One specific way to implement this is to create and operate brand fan communities on social networking sites. Brands can place posts (including videos, messages, quizzes, information, and other material) in these brand communities. By customer’s reposting or commenting on the posts, it subsequently reflects the brand post popularity. In order to investigate the possible drivers for brand post popularity in the Chinese social media context, this thesis selects Tuborg’s Green Fest as the case, its official account on Weibo as the platform, and analyzes the correlation between six driven factors and brand post popularity pairwise.  Results show that interactivity is the most important factor for popularity; a higher level of interactivity would help boost popularity. Followed by entertaining content and vividness are also two factors that positively related to brand post popularity. Moreover, the post theme of Fans interaction is most popular with fans, while the theme of Green Fest information would have negative impact on post popularity. Nevertheless, informational content is not welcome by the fans either, which may have a negative influence on popularity. Managers of brands that operate brand fan communities can be guided by this research with regards to deciding which characteristics or content to place in their brand posts.

This research examines discourses on the social media site Weibo around the group of international asylum seekers during an online campaign launched by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to raise awareness of asylum seekers in the People’s Republic of China on June 2017. Sina Weibo is a Chinese social media site with its users making up of around 50% of total Chinese internet users (Weibo, 2017). Despite the background that Chinese government aims at taking more significant responsibility in global governance, in the same time as China demonstrates emerging interests in refugee issues, commentaries from grassroots Chinese on social media, however, held an altered stance. According to the author’s observation, during and after the UNHCR campaign of World Refugee Day on June 20, 2017, comments on topics of international refugee, refugee protection as well as certain religious and ethnic groups (Islam and Muslim, for example) on Weibo were mainly loaded with negative emotions, biased stereotypes, and resistant sentiments.  The study is an interdisciplinary study contemplating theory in several disciplines, such as international migration and ethnic relations, international relations, public attitude dynamics, public communication, and new media. It is based on a critical discourse analysis approach, where the relationship between cyber discursive practices and the social, cultural, and power structure in the Chinese context is studied. Chinese public perception of the European “refugee crisis”, the public reaction toward several humanitarian pursuits which are deemed to be possessed by the West, grassroots identification of usand them, the global production and dissemination of particular xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiments will be studied. Last but not least, features of social media concerning their possible impacts on the aspects mentioned above are analyzed.

This study explores how people with medical concerns seek and perceive social support via Weibo—a social network site in China. The study conducts both a content analysis and an in-depth interview for a comprehensive understanding of the nature of social support on Weibo. Altogether 2548 postings and replies from four Weibo support groups—the Breast Cancer Group, the Arthritis Group, Baby Eczema Group and Children’s Health Group—were categorized into 9 types with a deductive thematic analysis; twenty participants from these four Weibo groups were recruited in the in-depth interview to explore how people seek and perceive social support from Weibo. Weibo stands out as a platform for people to exchange social support for its convenience, multiple functions, and strong ability to connect each other. Though there are some disadvantages of Weibo social support identified by Weibo users, they can, to some extent, be avoided and reduced under appropriate administration.