Group Emotion Evolution in Online Social Networks

Online social network data are one of the most effective and accurate indicators for studying public emotions. Therefore, we choose data from Sina Weibo, one of the four largest online social networking sites in China, as empirical data and choose the incident of the "truck driver who took pesticide" that occurred in Tangshan, China, in April 2021 as an experimental case. The incident was the suicide of a truck driver, Jin Deqiang, who took pesticide in Tangshan City because he was fined by the traffic police, which led to public opinion topics extending and fermenting. We used crawler tools to collect information on related blog posts and comments, comment time, number of forwards, number of likes, and number of comments on the Sina Weibo platform from April 5, 2021, to April 12, 2021, using "driver drinking medicine", "Tangshan truck" and "Jin Deqiang" as keywords and obtained a total of 20,958 pieces of data. At the same time, these keywords are used to crawl the officially certified government microblogs and media microblogs on Sina Weibo during that time period and obtain textual information such as the user names, the number of followers, the content of the posted blog posts, the posting time, and the number of forwards of these microblogs.