Leading with hearts and minds: Broadcasters, emotion initiators, and emotion brokers in emotion contagion in China’s online activism

How do emotional messages diffuse, and who are the prominent actors that led the diffusion in online activism in China? In this exploratory study, we examine networked patterns of anger diffusion within the Red-Yellow-Blue kindergarten children abuse scandal on the Chinese social media Weibo. Using supervised machine learning for emotion labelling and a social network analysis approach, we identified three types of actors and profiled their distinctive roles in the process of anger contagion. Broadcasters (e.g., verified organization accounts) act as both an information source and a legitimate source to elicit other users’ emotion through emotion-free information. Furthermore, emotion initiators like celebrities instigate and lead other users’ emotions, while emotion brokers like grassroots celebrities build bridges between people and subgroups to form a massive-scale network of emotion contagion. These actors are indispensable and complement each other for emotion contagion in China. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings on the understanding of emotion diffusion in online activism.