User:Datong Xu/sandbox

Big V
A Big V, also known as Sina Weibo celebrity, “they are VIP accounts on Sina Weibo, which refers to verified users”, is a type of internet celebrity who has gained popularity and more than 50 million followers on Sina Weibo.

Etymology
V means a very important person, Big V refers to “Sina Weibo users whose account has been verified and usually there is a yellow sign “V” after their user name. Majority of the Big V users are “elite people in the real word”, for example they can be well-known scholars, actors and scientists, who have great influence on their followers.

Influence
Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website and is also the “most popular and the biggest social media platform” in China. According to “the Chinese company’s first quarter results, Sina Weibo has more than 340 million active monthly users.” The spread of views from Big V users on Sina Weibo can have a dramatic impact and can affect the process of some social events.”

Big V users often have a large number of followers and are able to generate the largest information cascades.” “China has a unique socio-political environment, public’s trust in state media is one of the dimensions of political trust.” The “censorship of political issues is very strict in China, Weibo serves as a platform to offer people a space to express their opinion towards social and political issues.” Big V users help ordinary users attract more attention and accelerate the flow of information. Because the majority of Big V users are “elite people” in the real word, and considering trust in experts is a part of social trust in China,  Big V users on Sina Weibo are widely considered  a reliable group to ask for help, by the public.

Deng Yujiao incident is a typical case to show Big V users influence on social events. Deng Yujiao is a 21 years old pedicure worker, “she stabbed a local township director to death when she tried to refuse the latter’s sexual harassment.” Police arrested and charged her with homicide. She was also denied bail. This case aroused significant social repercussions, and after Some Big V users posted Deng’s case on Sina Weibo to show their support of" freeing her without criminal penalties, millions of users on Sina Weibo posted their support as well, they even went as far as travelling to Deng’s local town to support her.” In the end, Deng’s charges were dropped and she did not receive any sentence. In this case, more than four million posts on Sina Weibo were transmitted across the whole of China, the public anger and Big V user’s influence “contributed to freeing Deng without any criminal penalties.”

Commercial Success
According to China’s KOL economy, “more than 70% Chinese consumers prefer buying products via Sina Weibo.” Becky Li is a Big V user on Sina Weibo, who has more than 7. 5 million followers on her account, “she is able to transform her followers into sales by posting products on her Sina Weibo account.” According to Sina Weibo, Fan Bingbing, a Big V user, posted a sake mask on her account, the mask was sold out shortly. A lot of brands are using Big V users as their brand representatives, because Big V users have great influence on their followers. A huge follower base for Big V users is a key standard to measure their commercial value. Yangmi, another Big V user on Sina Weibo who has 54 million followers on her Weibo account, is also the brand ambassador for Michael Kors. Yangmi posts a lot of pictures about Michael Kors products on her account. In the meantime, Michael Kors is the fastest growing Asia market with sales in 2017 up 96.3% of the previous year. Yangmi’s huge follower base is a sign of enormous purchasing power. Yangmi is a successful case of how followers are transformed into big sales. Big V’s social influences contribute to their commercial success and values.

Supervision Measure
As the biggest social media platform, Sina Weibo is considered an important information and news provider. According to “Chinese academy of social science, about 60 percent of  fake news is first posted on Sina Weibo; Sina Weibo becomes the top source of fake news.” The existence of Big V users can expand the spread of fake news due to their huge social influence. In 2011, Chinese people were buying salt in a panic. This happened due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, after rumours spread rapidly about a table salt shortage on Weibo. Many Big V users posted that salt will be exposed to nuclear radiation so the public will face table salt shortage, which triggered a public panic. Many people rushed to grocery stores to buy table salt. The sale panic case caused the social widespread panic.

Sina Weibo has developed a strict censorship system aimed at harmful content and fake news. In 2017, Sina Weibo officially hired 1000 “Weibo Supervisors”, whose job was to “report illegal and harmful information they found on Weibo and were authorized to reduce the user’s “Weibo social credit”. This move restricts their user access on Weibo.” Weibo supervisors have more authority than Big V users. If Big V users post illegal and harmful content, the Weibo supervisors have the authority to block their accounts. This strategic action aims at stopping Big V users from abusing their powers due to their huge social influence.

Besides the “Weibo Supervisor”, Sina Weibo also launched “false rumour detection program”, which is an automatic false rumour detect algorithm, “this new program achieves an accuracy of 91.3% in successfully detecting rumours on Sina Weibo.”