Exploring Weibo users’ attitudes toward lesbians and gays in Mainland China: A natural language processing and machine learning approach

Sexual Minorities within Heterosexuality: Psychosocial Characteristics of and Attitudes toward the "Fourth Love" in China

Objective

Within the context of gender diversity, the concept of heterosexuality is also changing, emerging as a diversified sexual orientation and identity. This study aims to challenge the orthodoxy about heterosexuality by exploring the psychosocial characteristics and attitudes toward "fourth love" in China.

Method

Two studies initially explored the current status of fourth love as a sexual minority. In Study 1, The Sex-Role Inventory and the Marital Attitude Scale were used to assess fourth-love (N = 144) and traditionally heterosexual participants' (N = 145) gender roles and marriage attitudes. In study 2, the Attitudes Toward the Fourth Love Scale was developed to assess college students' (N = 315) attitudes toward fourth-love men and women.

Result

Fourth-love women often identify with masculine gender roles and significant differences were found between fourth-love and traditionally heterosexual women their gender roles. Fourth-love men identified with a neutral gender role, while there are significant differences between fourth-love men and traditionally heterosexual women in masculine gender roles. Fourth-love people's marriage attitudes were more negative than those of traditionally heterosexual people, especially for women. Various demographic factors influenced college students' attitudes toward the fourth love.

Conclusion

As a sexual minority within the umbrella of heterosexuality in China, fourth-love individuals require further research attention and increased support.

Status quo and predictors of Weibo users' attitudes toward lesbians and gay men in 31 provinces in the Chinese mainland: Analysis based on supervised machine learning and provincial panel data

Introduction

Public attitudes toward consensual same-sex relations are crucial to lesbians' and gay men's rights and society's well-being, but research addressing this topic in China is limited. We comprehensively explored the current status and predictors of Weibo users' attitudes toward individuals who are lesbian or gay (IWLG) at the provincial level in the Chinese mainland.

Methods

Natural language processing and machine learning techniques were incorporated to analyze 1,934,008 Weibo posts from January 1, 2010, to December 31, 2020, to evaluate Weibo users' expressed attitudes toward IWLG in 31 provinces in the Chinese mainland guided by the ABC Model of attitude.

Results

Although the general attitudes, feelings, and support for the rights of Weibo users toward IWLG among different provinces were relatively positive, knowledge about IWLG was noticeably inaccurate. Economic development and educational level positively predicted certain aspects of attitudes at the provincial level.

Conclusion

Weibo users from different provinces are generally supportive and accepting of people who are gay and the rights of the gay community. However, considerable misconceptions and inaccurate knowledge of IWLG surfaced in Weibo users' posts. Economic development and educational level were important predictors of specific attitudes toward IWLG at the provincial level. Increased efforts to address the unbalanced and insufficient development between different provinces could help reduce the public's prejudice, stigma, and discrimination toward IWLG. Policies that facilitate greater implementation of Comprehensive Sexuality Education sequentially and effectively are suggested as well.

Bridge of Rainbow: Association Between Internet-Based Social Media Use and Homosexuality Inclusion in China

By using the nationally representative dataset of China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, this paper explored the relationship between internet-based social media use and Chinese people's homosexuality inclusion. Addressing endogeneity by using an instrumental variable approach, the results of instrumental variable-ordered probit model indicated that individuals' internet-based social media use had a positive and significant association with their homosexuality inclusion. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analysis revealed that the heterogeneous effects of internet-based social media use on homosexuality inclusion caused by income, gender, and region. The homosexuality inclusion of respondents with higher income, respondents of female gender, and respondents located in eastern region of China was found to be more evidently associated with internet-based social media use. The functional mechanism analysis suggested that the number of respondents' LGBT friends mediated the overall relationship between internet-based social media use and homosexuality inclusion. The robustness check showed that the results were robust cross different models. The findings in this paper provide new evidence that the effect of information technology development on individual perception and behavior in Chinese context.

Social Media as a Medium to Promote Local Perception Expression in China’s World Heritage Sites

The assessment of public participation is one of the most fundamental components of holistic and sustainable cultural heritage management. Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic became a catalyst for the transformation of participatory tools. Collaboration with stakeholders moved online due to the strict restrictions preventing on-site activities. This phenomenon provided an opportunity to formulate more comprehensive and reasonable urban heritage protection strategies. However, very few publications mentioned how social networking sites’ data could support humanity-centred heritage management and participatory evaluation. Taking five World Cultural Heritage Sites as research samples, the study provides a methodology to evaluate online participatory practices in China through Weibo, a Chinese-originated social media platform. The data obtained were analysed from three perspectives: the users’ information, the content of texts, and the attached images. As shown in the results section, individuals’ information is described by gender, geo-location, celebrities, and Key Opinion Leaders. To a greater extent, participatory behaviour emerges at the relatively primary levels, that being “informing and consulting”. According to the label detection of Google Vision, residents paid more attention to buildings, facades, and temples in the cultural heritage sites. The research concludes that using social media platforms to unveil interplays between digital and physical heritage conservation is feasible and should be widely encouraged.

Comprehensive Sexuality Education Improves Primary Students' Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Toward Homosexuality

Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is a curriculum-based process that is inclusive to gender and sexual orientation. We used the attitude toward homosexuality scale and the single category implicit association test (SC-IAT) to measure differences between explicit and implicit attitudes toward homosexuality between migrant children with 6 years CSE learning experience (experimental group, N = 70) and those without (control group, N = 80). We found that the experimental group had more positive explicit and implicit attitudes toward homosexuality than the control group. In conclusion, CSE is a useful process for improving the explicit and implicit attitudes of migrant children toward homosexuality.