Are green influencers persuasive among eco-content followers on China's major social media platforms? An exploration of emotions, attitudes, and discourse

In the digital era, social media is a primary channel for environmental communication, but existing research has theoretical limitations in linking emotions to pro-environmental attitudes. By integrating sentiment analysis with attitudinal stance, this study expands the emotion spectrum from four to eight types and makes two contributions. First, it introduces “green influence” as a concept for analyzing environmental communication on social media. Second, drawing on Social Identity Theory, it distinguishes emotions as “limited” or “extended”, clarifying how emotion relates to social identity. Analysis of 5659 comments from China's three major social media platforms—using multinomial logistic regression, zero-inflated negative binomial regression, and LDA topic modeling—shows that extended emotions are significantly and positively associated with supportive environmental attitudes and green influence, whereas limited emotions have weaker effects. These findings support the generalizability of the “emotion-driven green consumption intention” framework in social media contexts, offer empirical grounding for environmental communication theory, and inform strategies for green content design.