• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1429-1441
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• 2016

While Facebook and Twitter get worldwide attention, these popular SNSs are not available in China. As the leading local SNS, Sina Weibo has garnered much of the attention in China. The purpose of the study was to explore why Chinese college students use Sina Weibo and if gender differences exist in the motivations for using it. The results from a survey of 360 respondents show that Chinese students used Sina Weibo mainly for information-gathering, followed by accessibility to celebrity, social connection, self-presentation and entertainment. Among them the most dominant reason for using Sina Weibo was found to be information-gathering. This finding suggests that Sina Weibo functions as a platform to search for information on social issues and interests. The study also found that these motivations were significantly different between male and female users. Interestingly, female respondents used Sina Weibo much more broadly than male counterparts, accessing it to satisfy all needs such as information gathering, accessibility to celebrity, social connection, self-presentation and entertainment. Based on these findings limitations and direction for future studies are discussed.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.87-96
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• 2017

Since SNS has gained its popularity as the means of diffusion of Hallyu, this study aims to examine the relationships between SNS use and Hallyu. In particular, this study explored how the use of SNS as a tool for obtaining information about Korean entertainment influence Chinese attitude toward Hallyu and Hallyu contents In doing so, the study conducted the case of Sina Weibo, the most leading SNS in China. The survey questionnaire was administrated to college students who use Sina Weibo in China. Two hundreds forty one surveys were included in the final analysis. The result indicated that Sina Weibo use is strong predictor influencing attitude toward Hallyu and Hallyu contents. The more students use Sina Weibo to get Korean entertainment information the more they have positive attitude toward Hallyu contents and acceptance of Hallyu in their life. In addition, the study found that attitude toward Hallyu(in terms of acceptability) depends on the level of activity in the Sina Weibo among college students in China. In other words, the passive users (e.g. lurking) are more likely to adopt Hallyu rather than active users (e.g. people who are more likely to retweet Korean entertainment information on Sina Weibo or click 'like). Based on these findings the implications, limitations and directions for future studies are discussed.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.367-374
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• 2017

The purpose of this study was to examine brand reliability, product attitude, and purchase intention attitude on a difference in a type between information source (General person / Company) in Sina Weibo. A questionnaire survey was conducted targeting 160 people. Questionnaire was conducted from April 3-7, 2017. The analysis was used 77 people for the General posting without error and 70 people for the Corporate posting. As a result of the research, general person posting is higher preference than public posting in brand reliability(General person M=2.5455/Company M=2.1306), product attitude(General person M=2.4589/Company M=1.9690), and purchase intention(General person M=2.5974/Company M=2.2750) according to type of posting information in Sina Weiboo. The outcome of this study will help to understand consumers' attitudes according to types of sources in China SNS.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.367-384
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• 2016

Social networking services (SNS) have become a significant platform for Internet users to obtain knowledge and information. Users can share messages mutually via this platform. This kind of sharing enables users to exchange and gain useful information. However, in recent years, the crisis of stickiness has appeared in SNS, calling attention to the social network industry. Relevant professionals explain that the interest of users in sharing knowledge on SNS websites and applications may gradually decrease, eventually leading to users giving it because the platforms utilize simple and uninteresting methods to attract active participation from users. However, factors affecting the knowledge sharing on SNS websites and applications should be identified clearly through studies. Sina Weibo is one of the largest SNS platforms in the world, and studies on the factors affecting knowledge sharing of users could be valuable in addressing this issue. This paper establishes the theoretical analysis model of knowledge sharing in SNS sites and applications, analyzes the factors affecting knowledge sharing on these sites, and proposes the corresponding strategies to address the issues. Using questionnaire surveys on Sina Weibo users, this article will discuss the factors affecting knowledge sharing, and analyze these factors on SNS as well as improve the stickiness of users to achieve the aim of SNS platforms enabling the expansion of the range of users. The study will discuss theoretical foundations and the hypotheses that arise. The method of study will also be discussed. The study concludes with theoretical implications, practical implications, limitations, and future research opportunities. The results of this study could aid researchers in understanding the underlying reasons for social network activities as well as for SNS developers in improving SNS services.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.3211-3229
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• 2022

To solve the problems existing in the process of Weibo disaster rumor recognition, such as lack of corpus, poor text standardization, difficult to learn semantic information, and simple semantic features of disaster rumor text, this paper takes Sina Weibo as the data source, constructs a dataset for Weibo disaster rumor recognition, and proposes a deep learning model BERT_AT_Stacked LSTM for Weibo disaster rumor recognition. First, add adversarial disturbance to the embedding vector of each word to generate adversarial samples to enhance the features of rumor text, and carry out adversarial training to solve the problem that the text features of disaster rumors are relatively single. Second, the BERT part obtains the word-level semantic information of each Weibo text and generates a hidden vector containing sentence-level feature information. Finally, the hidden complex semantic information of poorly-regulated Weibo texts is learned using a Stacked Long Short-Term Memory (Stacked LSTM) structure. The experimental results show that, compared with other comparative models, the model in this paper has more advantages in recognizing disaster rumors on Weibo, with an F1_Socre of 97.48%, and has been tested on an open general domain dataset, with an F1_Score of 94.59%, indicating that the model has better generalization.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.105-117
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• 2021

This study examined the factors that influence the emotional expression in comments on the hot news about the 'Restaurant Collapse in Linfen City, Shanxi Province' published in Sina Weibo.. As a result of the study, first, there were differences in emotional expression according to gender. Women expressed stronger anger, disappointment, sadness, and condemnation than men. Second, the intensity of emotional expression of users in the eastern region was significantly higher than that of users in the central and western region. Third, the greater the number of Weibo, the total number of blogs where users participated in comments and posted emotional expressions, the stronger the emotional expression was. Fourth, unauthenticated users showed stronger emotional expressions of disappointment and sadness than authenticated users. The results of this study present implications for the factors influencing emotional expression on hot news. This study is meaningful in that it can be compared with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in the West by looking at the factors that influence emotional expression in the process of online public opinion formation in China, and also meaningful in that a big data analysis method was used in online news analysis.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.197-218
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• 2019

In addition to economic growth and national income increase, China is also experiencing rapid growth in consumption of cosmetics. About 67% of the total trade volume of Chinese cosmetics is made by e-commerce and especially K-Beauty products, which are Korean cosmetics are very popular. According to previous studies, 80% of consumer goods such as cosmetics are affected by the word of mouth information, searching the product information before purchase. Mostly, consumers acquire information related to cosmetics through comments made by other consumers on SNS such as SINA Weibo and Wechat, and recently they also use information about beauty related video channels. Most of the previous online word-of-mouth researches were mainly focused on media itself such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. However, the informational characteristics and the expression forms are also diverse. Typical types are text, picture, and video. This study focused on these types. We analyze the unstructured data of SINA Weibo, the SNS representative platform of China, and Meipai, the video platform, and analyze the impact of K-Beauty brand sales by dividing online word-of-mouth information with quantity and direction information. We analyzed about 330,000 data from Meipai, and 110,000 data from SINA Weibo and analyzed the basic properties of cosmetics. As a result of analysis, the amount of online word-of-mouth information has a positive effect on the sales of cosmetics irrespective of the type of media. However, the online videos showed higher impacts than the pictures and texts. Therefore, it is more effective for companies to carry out advertising and promotional activities in parallel with the existing SNS as well as video related information. It is understood that it is important to generate the frequency of exposure irrespective of media type. The positiveness of the video media was significant but the positiveness of the picture and text media was not significant. Due to the nature of information types, the amount of information in video media is more than that in text-oriented media, and video-related channels are emerging all over the world. In particular, China has made a number of video platforms in recent years and has enjoyed popularity among teenagers and thirties. As a result, existing SNS users are being dispersed to video media. We also analyzed the effect of online type of information on the online cosmetics sales by dividing the product type of cosmetics into basic cosmetics and color cosmetics. As a result, basic cosmetics had a positive effect on the sales according to the number of online videos and it was affected by the negative information of the videos. In the case of basic cosmetics, effects or characteristics do not appear immediately like color cosmetics, so information such as changes after use is often transmitted over a period of time. Therefore, it is important for companies to move more quickly to issues generated from video media. Color cosmetics are largely influenced by negative oral statements and sensitive to picture and text-oriented media. Information such as picture and text has the advantage and disadvantage that the process of making it can be made easier than video. Therefore, complaints and opinions are generally expressed in SNS quickly and immediately. Finally, we analyzed how product diversity affects sales according to online word of mouth information type. As a result of the analysis, it can be confirmed that when a variety of products are introduced in a video channel, they have a positive effect on online cosmetics sales. The significance of this study in the theoretical aspect is that, as in the previous studies, online sales have basically proved that K-Beauty cosmetics are also influenced by word-of-mouth. However this study focused on media types and both media have a positive impact on sales, as in previous studies, but it has been proven that video is more informative and influencing than text, depending on media abundance. In addition, according to the existing research on information direction, it is said that the negative influence has more influence, but in the basic study, the correlation is not significant, but the effect of negation in the case of color cosmetics is large. In the case of temporal fashion products such as color cosmetics, fast oral effect is influenced. In practical terms, it is expected that it will be helpful to use advertising strategies on the sales and advertising strategy of K-Beauty cosmetics in China by distinguishing basic and color cosmetics. In addition, it can be said that it recognized the importance of a video advertising strategy such as YouTube and one-person media. The results of this study can be used as basic data for analyzing the big data in understanding the Chinese cosmetics market and establishing appropriate strategies and marketing utilization of related companies.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.161-172
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• 2014

While innovative information technologies have been adopted quickly into our daily life, we often experience the discontinuance after being temporarily adopted. This paper aims to study the factors influencing discontinuance on Microblog to Chinese users who already temporarily adopted it. According to empirical analysis, complexity and security show up their influences into all perceived risks, and inconvenience innovation and subjective norm just effect social risks. And perceived risk shows influences in every reasons for discontinuance, especially lots influences come from complexity. So according to these results, it is needed that the complexity of Microblog should be reduced.

• Asian Journal for Public Opinion Research
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.249-267
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• 2014

Social media is being increasingly utilized in disaster relief work to identify safety issues, locate displaced-victims, and seek or provide support for those who need help. The presence of social media in disaster management has changed significantly in recent years, as it was not prevalent in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, but had become a powerful force in the 2013 Ya'an earthquake. This paper discusses the development of social media in disaster management via making a comparison between how it functioned in the two earthquakes. It examines the following aspects: who are the stakeholders that use social media in the earthquake management; how do they adopt this means in response to the earthquakes; and what are the outcomes of adopting social media with regards to public engagement and collaboration in an emergency event. As Sina Weibo acts as the equivalent of China's Twitter, the methodology relies on an analysis of posts in Weibo. The outcomes primarily show that: (1) authorities, celebrities and the public actively adopted social media for the purpose of information dissemination and resource mobilization; and (2) social media users are both content consumers and content generators in the times of earthquakes. The study concludes that social media as a backchannel communication tool is helpful for government institutions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations to build relationships with their stakeholders in the disaster management cycle. The result will interest academics and emergency management practitioners who are concerned with improving disaster communication.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.19-30
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• 2018

The main purposes of this study are to analyze the contents and text network of online tourism information. For this purpose, Jeju Island, one of the representative tourist destinations in South Korea is selected as a study site. And this study collects the contents of both JeJu official tourism website and Sina Weibo's personal blogs which is one of the most popular Social Network Systems in China. In addition, this study analyzes this online text information using ROST Content Mining System, one of the Chinese big data mining systems. The results of the content analysis show that the formal website of Jeju includes the nouns related to natural, geographical and physical resources, verbs related to existence of resources, and adjectives related to the beauty, cleanness and convenience of resources mainly. Meanwhile, personal blogs include the nouns of Korean-wave, food, local products, other destinations and shopping, verbs related to activity and feeling in Jeju, and adjectives related to their experiences and feeling mainly. Finally, the results of text network show that there are some strong centrality and network of online tourism information at formal website, but there are weak relationships in personal blogs. The results of this study may be able to contribute to the development of demand-based marketing strategies of tourists destination.