Who post more negatively on social media? A large-scale sentiment analysis of Weibo users

Negative behaviours on social media have been widely researched in cyberpsychology studies. However, studies using actual usage data are still limited, especially for the Chinese social media Weibo. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between Weibo users' actual usage and negative online behaviours. We located 2463 Weibo users who had posted highly negative posts after screening 10,483,628 comments under nine trending topics. Their publicly visible usage data were collected and 4,273,442 microblogs (including 234,379 original posts) were analysed using sentiment analysis. Results show that the users' percentage of negative posts was positively correlated with their number of posts, number of followers, number of followings and Weibo account levels. The majority (94.84%) of the 2463 negative comment releasers did not frequently post negative microblogs; less than 50% of their total original posts were negative. Women posted more negatively than men. The present study contributes to the understanding of Weibo users' negative posting behaviours. More investigations are needed for the reasons for negative behaviours on social media and the approaches of predicting negative online behaviours from general usage data.