The Influence of Social Platform Privacy on Self-Construction and Public Opinion Tendency -- Sina Weibo and WeChat as Examples

Abstract

In recent years, a number of social events have attracted widespread attention on various different social media platforms. Among them, the public perceptions of the same event are different on different media platforms. Because of the different privacy of different social media platforms, they have different degrees of influence on the self-construction of users, the composition of interpersonal relationships on social media platforms, and the tendency of public opinion on social media platforms. This paper focuses on two different social media, WeChat and Weibo, and examines the reasons for the phenomenon of "WeChat being silent and Weibo being active" from the perspective of their functions and characteristics and investigates the impact of this phenomenon on public opinion tendencies. This paper concludes that people are more neutral and conservative in commenting on socially focused events on social media platforms where privacy is disclosed to easy acquaintances because of the psychology of building a positive self-image, but on social media platforms with fewer acquaintances, people do not need to be responsible for their own statements, so they are less burdened when speaking, and therefore their statements have more obvious tendencies. Under the influence of this tendency, social media platforms with more privacy will have a more conservative opinion tendency and vice versa, a more aggressive opinion tendency.