Chinese online nationalism as imaginary engagement: an automated sentiment analysis of Tencent news comments on the 2012 Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands incident

Abstract How does Tencent—a leading Chinese Internet enterprise—frame news to regulate popular nationalism? To address this problem, we applied the automated sentiment analysis program to more than 500,000 news comments on the Tencent news website during the 2012 Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands incident. The results show that audiences’ online nationalism is significantly influenced by Tencent news, user engagement, and emotions. First, contrary to using stimulative nationalist narratives in the early stages of the incident, the platform shifts to restrictive nationalist narratives to prevent online nationalism from endangering social governance; second, restrictive news can decrease popular nationalism compared with stimulative news; third, users’ love, anger, and disgust emotion can increase their support for China, while the happiness emotion has the opposite effect. Online nationalism, as imaginary engagement, arises from the collusion among platforms, the government, and audiences, contributing to maintaining the government’s legitimacy. The computational approach promises to shed light on nationalism research.