Who can be the Weibo supervisor? the co-production of social media governance in mainland China

The new media makes everyone a gatekeeper (Schweisberger et al., 2014). Public opinions on online censorship and government intervention are more diverse and dependent on specific circumstances than expected (A. F. Zhang et al., 2017). Weibo has tried a new way of using users to govern users, namely Weibo supervisors. Weibo supervisor went live on September 27, 2017. It is a new way of co-production of social media governance for Weibo to dispose of pornographic, illegal, and harmful information on it, thereby purifying the environment of Weibo. Weibo users can pass the assessment and examination to become Weibo supervisors and participate in the governance. The number of Weibo supervisors is capped at 2,000, only some of the eligible applicants have become Weibo supervisors. This study collected the public personal information of successful and failed applicants and try to explore the potential admission mechanism of Weibo supervisors.

This study uses Python to crawl the data of both successful and failed applicants of Weibo supervisors from July 27, 2021 to August 02, 2021. Using the keyword of “Weibo supervisor” (wei bo jian du yuan 微博监督员), 404 successful applicants were obtained. Using the keyword of “Weibo supervisor” (wei bo jian du yuan 微博监督员) with “application” (shen qing 申请), “failure” (shi bai 失败), “result” (jie guo 结果), 404 fail applicants were obtained. In the data, be Weibo supervisor or not was used as the dependent variable. Gender, GDP of location, the integrity of information, including birthday, personal introduction, email, education, and occupation, previous verification number, registration year, following number, follower number, and post number are used as independent variables. This study uses binomial logical regression to estimate the effect of the above independent variables on whether to be a Weibo supervisor.

489 (71.78%) of successful applicants were male. The distribution of the post number, the following number, and the follower number of successful applicants all show a long-tailed distribution. According to the result of binomial logical regression, the male with less previous verification number who register early are more easily to be the Weibo supervisor. The integrity of information is not related to whether the user can be the Weibo supervisor. The number of posts, followers, and followings also have no effect on whether the user can be the Weibo supervisor.

This study addresses a new approach to collaborative social media governance that uses users to govern users. This research is an area less covered by previous research, which helps to promote the expansion of Internet governance research content.