CENTRAL POLICY UNIT THE GOVERNMENT OF THE HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION A STUDY ON UNDERSTANDING AND ANALYZING ONLINE PUBLIC OPINION IN “HONG KONG CYBERSPACE” THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG NOVEMBER 2011 Understanding and Analyzing Online Public Opinion in “Hong Kong Cyberspace” November 2011 Research Team Principal Investigator: King-wa Fu, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong Co-Investigator: Michael Chau, Innovation and Information Management, School of Business, The University of Hong Kong Developer: Cédric Sam, Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong 1 Table of Contents Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................ 4 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 8 Online Opinion in Hong Kong .................................................................................................... 8 What are lacking ..................................................................................................................... 8 Policy Implications ..................................................................................................................... 9 Objectives of this Study .............................................................................................................. 9 Scope of the Study .................................................................................................................... 10 Approach and Methodology ......................................................................................................... 11 Data collection .......................................................................................................................... 11 Online discussion forum ....................................................................................................... 12 Blogs ..................................................................................................................................... 12 Twitter and microblogging .................................................................................................... 12 Facebook Groups/Pages/Events ............................................................................................ 13 Data analysis ............................................................................................................................. 13 Time-trend statistics .............................................................................................................. 13 Keyword analysis .................................................................................................................. 14 Social network analysis......................................................................................................... 14 Sentiment analysis ................................................................................................................ 14 Technical Architecture .................................................................................................................. 16 Definitions................................................................................................................................. 16 Sina Weibo ................................................................................................................................ 16 Background ........................................................................................................................... 16 Data collection ...................................................................................................................... 16 Reports .................................................................................................................................. 17 Search engine ........................................................................................................................ 18 Scripts ................................................................................................................................... 18 Twitter ....................................................................................................................................... 18 Background ........................................................................................................................... 18 Data collection ...................................................................................................................... 18 Reports .................................................................................................................................. 20 Scripts ................................................................................................................................... 20 Facebook ................................................................................................................................... 20 Background ........................................................................................................................... 20 The shotgun ........................................................................................................................... 20 The watch list ........................................................................................................................ 21 The watching ......................................................................................................................... 21 Limitations ............................................................................................................................ 22 Blogs ......................................................................................................................................... 22 Background ........................................................................................................................... 22 Creating list of blogs to follow ............................................................................................. 22 Collecting posts ..................................................................................................................... 22 Scripts ................................................................................................................................... 22 Limitations ............................................................................................................................ 22 HK Forums................................................................................................................................ 23 Background ........................................................................................................................... 23 Forums under study............................................................................................................... 23 Data structure ........................................................................................................................ 23 2 Programs ............................................................................................................................... 23 Results ........................................................................................................................................... 24 Time-trend statistics .................................................................................................................. 24 Total amount of postings/tweets/retweets ............................................................................. 24 Frequency of each source ...................................................................................................... 25 Unique contributors by source .............................................................................................. 26 Discussion Forum Topics ...................................................................................................... 27 Retweeting and Reposting .................................................................................................... 28 Active users and their last update ......................................................................................... 29 Peak hour of publication ....................................................................................................... 30 Article length ........................................................................................................................ 31 Other characteristics (e.g. whether it was attached with image, link, or unit icon) .............. 32 Keyword analysis ...................................................................................................................... 34 Term frequency analysis ....................................................................................................... 34 Term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis ......................................... 35 Social Network Analysis ........................................................................................................... 38 Sentiment analysis .................................................................................................................... 46 Method .................................................................................................................................. 46 Results ..................................................................................................................................