With social media becoming fully integrated into the public eye, platforms such as Weibo have become important venues for expressing emotions and social values. Especially when it comes to gender issues, women's voices in the digital space are often harassed. This article focuses on the phenomenon of 'female harassment among trending topics on Weibo, selecting three representative public opinion incidents involving Fang Qi, Mai Lin, and Wu Liufang as case studies, combining text analysis and comment data mining to trace the path of emotion propagation and its correlation with gender bias and platform algorithms. Research has found that the dissemination mechanism of 'hot search + emotional reinforcement on the Weibo platform, combined with gender stereotypes in society, makes it easy for women who break through traditional gender role expectations to be labelled. This mechanism not only causes female parties to suffer multiple pressures in terms of reputation, psychology, and career, but also restricts women's right to expression in the digital space, constituting structural gender inequality. This paper argues that in the pursuit of traffic, platforms have reinforced the logic of public opinion, which is characterised by 'conflict-emotion-sharing. This has instead weakened the atmosphere of diverse and rational public discussion. This study attempts to approach the issue from the perspectives of emotional contagion, public opinion structure, and gender politics, providing valuable insights for platform algorithm governance, public opinion guidance, and the creation of gender-friendly digital spaces.
Wanjun Gu (Wed,) studied this question.