The Role of Individual Initiative in the Recommendation Mechanisms of Chinese Social Media

Abstract

An attempt to explore the role of individual user initiative in social media platforms popular in China such as Weibo and TikTok. Individual users' choices are flexible as well as directed on social media platforms. The methodology used in this paper is a questionnaire survey to collect user data for analysis. Options with mass characteristics as the main reason as well as other reasons such as news timeliness largely influence individual autonomy. The group attributes of the masses are also amplified on social media platforms. The phenomenon of group identity can also give rise to many derivative situations, sometimes favouring social harmony and sometimes obscuring much of the truth. In recent years, social media platforms have grown up, with countless topics emerging. But in many cases, the heat of a topic doesn't just come from the attractiveness of the topic itself, it can also be stacked up by the public's choices. To a certain extent, the phenomenon of mass identification influences the rise and fall of an event, and there are also people who take advantage of the phenomenon of individual group identification to ‘brush up the traffic’. It proves that people naturally belong to a group, and the public is unlikely to make choices that go against the characteristics of the group. This paper investigates these views using Chinese social media platforms.