Analysis of Social Media Utilization based on Big Data-Focusing on the Chinese Government Weibo

Abstract

The rapid popularity of government social media has generated huge amounts of text data, and the analysis of these data has gradually become the focus of digital government research. This study uses Python language to analyze the big data of the Chinese provincial government Weibo. First, this study uses a web crawler approach to collect and statistically describe over 360,000 data from 31 provincial government microblogs in China, covering the period from January 2018 to April 2022. Second, a word separation engine is constructed and these text data are analyzed using word cloud word frequencies as well as semantic relationships. Finally, the text data were analyzed for sentiment using natural language processing methods, and the text topics were studied using LDA algorithm. The results of this study show that, first, the number and scale of posts on the Chinese government Weibo have grown rapidly. Second, government Weibo has certain social attributes, and the epidemics, people's livelihood, and services have become the focus of government Weibo. Third, the contents of government Weibo account for more than 30% of negative sentiments. The classified topics show that the epidemics and epidemic prevention and control overshadowed the other topics, which inhibits the diversification of government Weibo.