Willingness to follow opinion leaders: A case study of Chinese Weibo

This study examined the effects of follower number and comment tone on judgements about potential opinion leaders and their pages on Weibo, a Chinese social media site. Two experiments differentiated different types of negative comments, uncivil, critical, neutral and mixed, to assess the effects of comment tone relative to previous research. The results suggest that these manipulations have minimal effects, and there is little evidence that the...