With greater popularity comes less responsibility: the popularity fallacy of Big Vs’ public participation on Sina Weibo

Abstract

Although popular users are more influential on social media, there may be a popularity fallacy in their public participation. We examined the relationship between the popularity of the most influential verified users (also known as “Big Vs”) of Sina Weibo and their participation in 63 of the most salient public issues from 2013 to 2016. The results support the existence of the popularity fallacy for Big Vs. Although the popularity of Big Vs has an indirect positive impact on their public participation because of the mediation of public influence, their popularity also has a direct negative impact on their public participation. Overall, their popularity hurts their public participation. We further explain the findings from the perspective of Big Vs’ occupational categories and impression management strategies. The results of this study shed light on our understanding of the limited role played by social media in influencing public participation.

Keywords:

• public participation
• popularity
• public influence
• Big Vs
• impression management tactic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by The Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (19JD001), The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (011014370119), The Planning Fund for Humanities and Social Sciences of Chongqing Education Commission (20SKGH258), The Foundation for Chongqing University of Education (KY201722C).

Notes on contributors

Xue-Fei Yan

Xue-Fei Yan received her M.S. in Communication from Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. She is currently a lecturer at the School of Literature and Media, Chongqing University of Education. Her research interests include social media, public communication, and computational communication.

Cheng-Jun Wang

Cheng-Jun Wang is currently an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing University. He is also the director of the Computational Communication Collaboratory. His research focuses on information diffusion, attention flow, and computational communication. He has published articles in Internet Research, Cyberpsychology, Telematics and Informatics, Scientific Reports, PloS ONE, and Physica A.