Journal of Social Computing 2023, 4(2): 168-180 https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2023.0014

Open Access | Issue | Published: 30 June 2023

Negative Sentiment Shift on a Chinese Movie-Rating Website

Show Author's Information Hide Author's Information Hongkai Mao(

)

Social Sciences Division, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Keywords:

sentiment analysis, computational social science, online community, group polarization, user engagement, negative sentiment

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Mao H. Negative Sentiment Shift on a Chinese Movie-Rating Website. Journal of Social Computing, 2023, 4(2): 168-180. https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2023.0014

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Abstract

Shifting to negativity is more and more prevalent in online communities and may play a key role in group polarization. While current research indicates a close relationship between group polarization and negative sentiment, they often link negative sentiment shifts with echo chambers and misinformation within echo chambers. In this work, we explore the sentiment drift using over 4 million comments from a Chinese online movie-rating community that is less affected by misinformation than other mainstream online communities and has no echo chamber structures. We measure the sentiment shift of the community and users of different engagement levels. Our analysis reveals that while the community does not show a tendency toward negativity, users of higher engagement levels are generally more negative, considering factors like the different movies they consume. The results indicate a fitting-in process, suggesting the possible mechanism of group identity on sentiment shift on social media platforms. These findings also provide guidance on web design to tackle the negativity issue and expand sentiment shift analysis to non-English contexts.

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About this article

Negative Sentiment Shift on a Chinese Movie-Rating Website

Show Author's information Hide Author's Information Hongkai Mao(

)

Social Sciences Division, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Abstract

Keywords: sentiment analysis, computational social science, online community, group polarization, user engagement, negative sentiment

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Acknowledgements

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Publication history

Received: 21 February 2023

Revised: 06 June 2023

Accepted: 22 July 2023

Published: 30 June 2023

Issue date: June 2023

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgment

The author would like to sincerely thank Professor Sanja Miklin for providing many constructive comments on an earlier draft, Professor Zhao Wang and James Evans for their valuable suggestions on methodological improvements, Stephen Parkin for refining the language, and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. The author would also like to thank Hongding Zhu, Henry Lin, Rui Pan, and Peihan Gao for their passionate discussions and encouragement and the developers who generously shared the dataset.

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The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).