Influential Factors on Collective Anxiety of Online Topic-Based Communities

Background: Under the uncertainty led by the decentralized information on social media, people seek homogeneity in either opinions or affection to establish group identity to better understand the information. This also means they are easily polarized, not only ideologically but also in their actions. Affective polarization is the emotional tendency for people to show animosity toward opposing partisans while seeking homogeneity from fellow partisans. Much research into online affective polarization has focused on quantifying anxiety at an individual level while neglecting that on a collective basis. Therefore, this paper examines the polarization of collective anxiety in topic-based communities on Weibo. Methods: We aim to interpret correlations between collective anxiety online and topic characteristics, user competence, as well as the proportion of influencers of Weibo topic-based communities. Our neural-networks model and statistical analysis were based on 200 communities with 403,380 personal accounts and 1,012,830 messages. Results: Collective anxiety levels are correlated to 1) the extent to which a topic captures public interest, 2) how community members articulate topics on social network platforms, and 3) the ratio of influencers in the community. Specifically, people’s conflicting perceptions and articulations of topics might increase collective anxiety, while the extent to which a topic is of the public interest and the number of influencers engaged in a topic account for any decline in its ranking. Furthermore, familiarity with a topic does not help predict collective anxiety levels. There are no significant links between community size or interactivity dynamics and the level of collective anxiety in the topic-based community. Our computational model has 85.00% precision and 87.00% recall. Conclusions: This study found the collective anxiety augment due to topic proximities to public interest and members’ lack of declarative knowledge on topics, while to decline with an increasing portion of online influencers. These findings indicate that collective anxiety is induced due to a lack of credibility. Also, the amount of conflicting information shared by different people places them in a state of flux. Therefore, a community with more influencers may be more likely to experience anxiety polarization, bringing forth the issue of layered information and inequality.