Real-world Islands in a Social Media Sea: Nationalism and Censorship on Weibo during the 2012 Diaoyu/Senkaku Crisis

During August and September 2012, Sino-Japanese conflict over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands escalated. Alongside street demonstrations in China, there was an outpouring of public sentiment on China's leading micro-blog, Sina Weibo (??). Using human and computer-assisted content analysis, we exploit original Weibo data to measure how public sentiment in China fluctuated over the dispute, and ask two questions. First, how cohesive and volatile were online nationalist sentiments? Second, we measure government censorship of Weibo in order to ask which sentiments did authorities allow to be expressed, and when? We first find that many of the micro-bloggers' harshest invective was directed not at Japan but at their own government. Second, while censorship remained high across topics for most of the dispute, it plummeted on 18 August - the same day as bloggers' anger at Beijing peaked. These observations suggest three theoretical explanations: two are instrumental-strategic (audience costs and safety valve) and one is ideational (elite identification with protesters).