Research On Weibo Users' Attitudes Toward Homosexuality

Homosexuality is a basic pattern of sexual behavior that prevails at different historical stages of human civilization.With the progress and development of Chinese society,our country has already realized the "decriminalization" and "nonpathologicalization" of homosexuality.However,because of the deep-rooted traditional thinking,many social publics are discriminated against or are opposed to homosexuality.Homosexuals in our country still endure the misreading of public opinion and unfair social treatment.In order to understand the living environment of homosexuals,analyzing the current situation of social attitudes toward homosexuality,as well as to improve the status of sex education in China,to help the public to establish the correct concept of sexuality,to eliminate misunderstandings and discrimination against homosexuality,to improve the mental health of homosexuals,striving for equal living space for homosexuals and promoting social harmony to provide reference,in this study I use Sina Weibo as a data source and use big data and text mining techniques to study the attitude of Sina Weibo users toward homosexuality.This study used a self-compiled crawler program combined with Sina official API to crawl a total of 1,983,875 gay-related Weibo text data in Sina Weibo from January 1 2010 to December 31 2016.After data cleaning,textual mining were carried out for 1,704,711 valid text data using big data “Hadoop” and “Spark” clusters and machine learning KNN algorithm,using R language to make statistical analysis of the data.Then we conducted an in-depth investigation of the Weibo users' attitudes toward homosexual on overall and cognitive component,emotional component,and behavioral tendencies component.The study found:1.In the past 7 years,Weibo users 'attitudes toward homosexuality have been generally very negative.From the attitude of the various components,Weibo users' understanding of homosexuality for the past seven years is very unscientific and the evaluation and acceptance of homosexuality are both negative.2.The total attitude,cognition accuracy,the positive degree of homosexual emotional reaction and acceptance degree of Weibo users toward homosexuality has been showing an increasingly positive trend in the past 7 years(from 2010 to 2016).3.Weibo users' attitudes toward homosexuality and their components have significant differences in gender,age,educational attainment,geography.In terms of gender,the positive degree of female users in homosexuality toward general attitude and emotional reaction is higher than that of male users and their level of awareness and acceptance is lower than that of male users.In terms of age,Teenagers have more positive attitudes toward homosexuality than those of young people,middle ages and seniors,respectively.In the cognition of homosexuality,middle-aged users are higher than those of juveniles and youths and juvenile users,and senior users are significant higher than that of young users.In the evaluation of homosexuality,the evaluation of middle-aged and elderly users is more positive and middle-aged users are higher than younger users.In terms of educational attainment,users receiving secondary education have a higher overall attitude toward homosexuality,emotional evaluation and acceptance than those with primary education and whose with higher education,and their awareness of homosexuality is higher than that of higher education users;while those who receive higher education respond more positively to homosexuality than those who receive primary education.Geographically speaking,Weibo user of Northeast China is higher than other 6 regions in terms of overall attitude and understanding of homosexuality.In the cognitive component of homosexual attitude,Northwest China is higher than East China and East China is higher than the other 4 regions.In the attitude toward homosexuality,South China is higher than the other 6 regions,Northeast China and Southwest China are higher than those in East China,North China and Northwest China.In the behavioral orientation toward homosexuality,Northeast China and Northwest China are significantly higher than East China,North China,Central China,South China;Central China,Southwest China is higher than East China,North China and other regions.