2.1. Participants and Data Collection
The samples in this study were from the original Weibo data pool [17]. The data pool contained more than 1.16 million active Weibo users. Weibo is a popular platform to share and discuss individual information and life activities, as well as celebrity news in China [18].
The retrieved data included (1) user’s profile information, (2) network behaviors, and (3) Weibo messages. Privacy was strictly protected during the procedure, referring to the ethical principles [19]. We have obtained the Ethical Committee’s approval and the ethic code is H15009.
The following inclusion criteria were employed to select active Weibo users from the data pool. First, they had published at least 50 original Weibo posts around a month in total from 31 December, 2019 to 26 January, 2020. Second, their authentication type is non-institutional (e.g., individual user, etc.). Third, their regional authentication is in China, not “overseas” or “other”.
We acquired 17,865 active Weibo users finally, then fetched all their original posts published during 13 January, 2020 to 26 January, 2020 into the two-week period for the analysis.