Abstract:

[Objective] By exploring the mutual influence and evolution mechanism of topic popularity on social media platforms, this paper provides a new perspective on the formation path of platform information narrowing and the regulation of public opinion clusters. Hot topics “free riding”, “media storm” and other effects do not pay attention to the heat transfer between unpopular topics; Most of the existing studies focus on the content of a single topic and the evolution of its popularity over time, and few studies on the influence network between global topics. Studies on “thermal convergence” ignore the heat transfer relationship between subjects with low similarity. [Methods] A total of 20,117,408 posts on Sina Weibo in one year were taken as samples, and the daily change sequence of the popularity of different topics in one year was extracted to test the influence of the average popularity of topics in Weibo on the ability of topics to change the popularity of other topics. [Results] The change in the heat of one topic will bring about a change in the heat of other topics. The higher the average heat of the theme, the stronger the ability of its heat change to drive and affect the heat change of other topics, and the easier it is to be affected by the heat change of other topics. [Conclusions] There is a regular interaction between the popularity of different topics on social media platforms. The heat conduction between different topics, unpopular topics, and between unpopular topics and popular topics is also an aspect that needs to be discussed.

Key words: social media, theme evolution, heat trigger, information cocoons