Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

Characteristics of Emotional Communication on Social Media Platforms: The Case of Women's Online Harassment in Weibo's Trending Topics

Wu GuUniversity of Colorado Denver*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

With social media becoming fully integrated into the public eye, platforms such as Weibo have become important venues for expressing emotions and social values. Especially when it comes to gender issues, women's voices in the digital space are often harassed. This article focuses on the phenomenon of 'female harassment' among trending topics on Weibo, selecting three representative public opinion incidents involving Fang Qi, Mai Lin, and Wu Liufang as case studies, combines text analysis and comment data mining to trace the path of emotion propagation and its correlation with gender bias and platform algorithms. Research has found that the dissemination mechanism of 'hot search + emotional reinforcement' on the Weibo platform, combined with gender stereotypes in society, makes it easy for women who break through traditional gender role expectations to be labelled. This mechanism not only causes female parties to suffer multiple pressures in terms of reputation, psychology and career, but also restricts women's right to expression in the digital space, constituting structural gender inequality. This paper argues that in the pursuit of traffic, platforms have reinforced the logic of public opinion, which is characterised by 'conflictemotion-sharing.' This has rather undermined the climate of diversity and rationality of wider public discussion. This study tries to address the problem through the lenses of emotional contagion, the structure of the opinion of the audience, and gender politics, which is valuable to govern platform algorithms, psychologically influence the opinion, and implement digital space more gender-friendly.

Keywords: Social media; trending topics on Weibo; gender bias; Online Harassment
Published: August 27, 2025
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2025.HT26210
Volume: CHR Vol.75
pp. 82-88
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