ABSTRACT
PurposeUnder the new media environment, while enjoying the convenience brought by the propagation of public opinion information (referred to as public opinion), learning the evolution process of public opinion and strengthening the governance of the spreading of public opinion are of great significance to promoting economic development and maintaining social stability as well as effectively resisting the negative impact of its propagation.Design/methodology/approachThinking about the results of empirical research and bibliometric analysis, this paper focused on introducing key factors such as information content, social strengthening effects, etc., from both internal and external levels, dynamically designed public opinion spreading rules and netizens' state transition probability. Subsequently, simulation experiments were conducted to discuss the spreading law of public opinion in two types of online social networks and to identify the key factors which influencing its evolution process. Based on the experimental results, the governance strategies for the propagation of negative public opinion were proposed finally.FindingsThe results show that compared with other factors, the propagation of public opinion depends more on the attributes of the information content itself. For the propagation of negative public opinion, on the one hand, the regulators should adopt flexible guidance strategy to establish a public opinion supervision mechanism and autonomous system with universal participation. On the other hand, they still need to adopt rigid governance strategy, focusing on the governance timing and netizens with higher network status to forestall the wide-diffusion of public opinion.Practical implicationsThe research conclusions put forward the enlightenment for the governance of public opinion in management practice, and also provided decision-making reference for the regulators to reasonably respond to the propagation of public opinion.Originality/valueOur research proposed a research framework for the discussion of public opinion propagation process and had important practical guiding significance for the governance of public opinion propagation.