After the Dust Settled: Online Participation and Adaptation in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Online messages reflect not only citizens’ policy preference but also their adaptation to a changing environment. In June 2020, when the Chinese government was considering the enactment of the National Security Law for Hong Kong, according to our data, supportive and neutral messages concerning the law accounted for over 70% of the messages posted online, far outnumbering negative ones. This pattern was observed regardless of whether a social media platform allowed for anonymity or not. By examining online messages both before and after the law took effect, this study finds that positive and neutral messages further outnumbered negative messages after the law took effect. This finding can be attributed to the presence of supporters of the law and to the Internet users’ shifting their attention away from the discussion of the law after the dust settled. Online reactions reflected the residents’ adaptation to the changing environment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Bochen Han, ‘New US report outlines “devastating effect” of national security law on Hong Kong’, South China Morning Post, October 5, 2022.

² William Galston, ‘Political knowledge, political engagement, and civic education’, Annual Review of Political Science 4(1), 2001, pp. 217–34; Norman Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 2.

³ Henry Brady, Sidney Verba, and Kay Lehman Schlozman, ‘Beyond Ses: A Resource Model of Political Participation’, American Political Science Review 89(2), (1995), pp. 271–294.

⁴ Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

⁵ Dennis Friess, Tobias Escher, Katharina Gerl, Micael Baumann, ‘Political Online Participation and Its Effects: Theory, Measurement, and Results’, Policy & Internet 13(3), (2021), pp. 345–348.

⁶ John Bertot, Jaeger, Paul; Grimes, Justin, ‘Promoting transparency and accountability through ICTs, social media, and collaborative e-government’, Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy 6(1), (2012), pp. 78–91.

⁷ Friess et. al., ‘Political Online Participation and Its Effects’, p. 333.

⁸ Alycia Burnett, Devin Knighton, and Christopher Wilson, ‘The Self-Censoring Majority: How Political Identity and Ideology Impacts Willingness to Self-Censor and Fear of Isolation in the United States’, Social Media + Society, July-September 2022, pp. 1–12; https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221123031; Andrew Hayes, Carroll Glynn, and James Shanahan, ‘Willingness to Self-Censor: A Construct and Measurement Tool for Public Opinion Research’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research 17(3), (2005), pp. 298–323; Kyounghee Kwon Hazel, Michael Stefanone, and Shin-Il Moon, ‘Unspeaking on Facebook? Testing network effects on self-censorship of political expressions in social network sites’, Quality & Quantity 49(4), (2015), pp. 1417–1435.

⁹ Michael Chan, ‘Reluctance to talk about politics in face-to-face and Facebook settings: Examining the impact of fear of isolation, willingness to self-censor, and peer network characteristics’, Mass Communication and Society 21(1), (2018), pp. 1–23. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2017.1358819; Christian Pieter and Christoph Lutz, ‘Spiral of silence 2.0: Political self-censorship among young Facebook users’. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on social media & Society, 2017, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3097286.3097296.

¹⁰ Andrew Hayes, Jörg Matthes, and William Eveland, ‘Stimulating the quasi-statistical organ: Fear of social isolation motivates the quest for knowledge of the opinion climate’, Communication Research 40(4), (2013), pp. 439–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650211428608

¹¹ Sauvik Das and Adam Kramer, ‘Self-Censorship on Facebook’, Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 7(1), (2013), pp. 120–127. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.1441.

¹² Rainie, Lee, Sara Kiesler, Ruogu Kang, and Mary Madden. 2013. ‘Anonymity, Privacy, and Security Online’. See the Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/09/05/anonymity-privacy-and-security-online/

¹³ Burnett et. al., ‘The Self-Censoring Majority’, p. 1; Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, ‘The Theory of Public Opinion: The Concept of the Spiral of Silence’, Annals of the International Communication Association 14(1), (1991), pp. 256–287.

¹⁴ Heng Ji and Kevin Knight, ‘Creative Language Encoding under Censorship’. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Internet Freedom, Association for Computational Linguistics, (Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2018), pp. 23–33,

¹⁵ Mary Hui, ‘China’s internet censors have a blindspot: Cantonese’. accessed October 3, 2022. see https://qz.com/china-censors-stumped-by-cantonese−1,849,496,778.

¹⁶ Kaiping Zhang, and Rene Kizilcec, ‘Anonymity in Social Media: Effects of Content Controversiality and Social Endorsement on Sharing Behavior’. Proceedings of the Eights International Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2014, pp. 643–646.

¹⁷ Michael Bernstein, Eytan Bakshy, Moira Burke, Brian Karrer, “Quantifying the invisible audience in social networks. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2013, pp. 21–30. ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2470654.2470658.

¹⁸ Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (eds.), The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT press, 2010).

¹⁹ Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren Miller, The Voter Decides. Evanston (IL: Row, Peterson, and Company, 1954), p. 187.

²⁰ Philip Pollock, ‘The Participatory Consequences of Internal and External Political Efficacy: A Research Note’, The Western Political Quarterly 36(3), (1983), pp. 400–409.

²¹ Finkel, Steven. 1985. ‘Reciprocal Effects of Participation and Political Efficacy: A Panel Analysis’, American Journal of Political Science 29(4), pp. 891–913.

²² Hong Kong Journalists Association, ‘Hong Kong Press Freedom Index for journalists hits record low’. See https://www.pori.hk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hong-Kong-Press-Freedom-Index-for-journalists-hits-record-low.pdf.

²³ Henry Brady, Sidney Verba, and Kay Lehman Schlozman, ‘Beyond Ses: A Resource Model of Political Participation’, American Political Science Review 89(2), (1995), pp. 271–294.

²⁴ Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

²⁵ Hong Kong Journalists Association, ‘Hong Kong Press Freedom Index for journalists hits record low’. 2021. See https://www.pori.hk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hong-Kong-Press-Freedom-Index-for-journalists-hits-record-low.pdf.

²⁶ Hong Kong Political Culture Survey 2021.

²⁷ We also did some extra work and tried to assess the influence of overseas users. We assessed the identity of the users by examining their language style. We chose 324 Cantonese words and phrases that were commonly used by Hong Kong residents when they discussed the law and local conditions in Hong Kong. About 16% of the users did not use those Cantonese words or phrases. If all these people were oversea users, they did not constitute a large segment. The statistical results of the full sample and the sample excluding overseas citizens are the same (see Table 3). We also used a machine learning model to estimate the number of overseas users, and the estimate based on the machine learning model was much smaller than 16%.

²⁸ W. Lance Bennett, ‘Toward a theory of press-state relations’, Journal of Communication 40(2), (1990), pp. 103–127.

²⁹ Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).

³⁰ Yiming Cui, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu, Bing Qin, Shijin Wang, and Guoping Hu, ‘Revisiting Pre-Trained Models for Chinese Natural Language Processing’, in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pp. 657–668, 2022. https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.58/

³¹ Nguyen Phong Hoang and Davar Pishva, “Anonymous Communication and its Importance in Social Networking. Paper presented at the 2014 16th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT), 2014.

³² Poppy Lauretta McLeod, ‘Effects of anonymity and social comparison of rewards on computer-mediated group brainstorming’, Small Group Research 42(4), (2011), pp. 475–503.

³³ Erick Jardine, ‘Tor, what is it good for? Political repression and the use of online.

anonymity-granting technologies’, New Media & Society 20(2), (2016), pp. 435–452.

³⁴ Werner Antweiler, Murray Z. Frank, ‘Is all that talk just noise? The information content of internet stock message boards’, The Journal of Finance 59(3), (2004), pp. 1259–1294.

³⁵ Anthony Cookson, Marina Niessner, ‘Why don’t we agree? Evidence from a social network of investors’, The Journal of Finance 75(1), (2019), pp. 173–228.

³⁶ Shanthikumar Devin, Qiao Wang, and Shijia Wu, ‘Does Interaction on Social Media Increase or Moderate Extremeness?’ SSRN Electronic Journal, Available at SSRN 3,879,175.

³⁷ Koo, ‘The Evolution of Self-Censorship in Hong Kong Online Journalism’.

³⁸ Francis Lee, Hai Liang, Edmund Cheng, Gary Tang and Samson Yuen, ‘Affordances, movement dynamics, and a centralized digital communication platform in a networked movement’, Information, Communication & Society, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1877772.

³⁹ Neutral messages dropped from 213 to 111, whereas positive ones dropped from 174 to 95.

⁴⁰ We did not find a clear pattern that Internet users chose different lexicons and subjects of blame after the NSL took effect. We examined the most frequently used 100 terms or phrases used in the messages posted before and after the NSL took effect. We found that the frequencies of the use of these words all declined after the law took effect, with three exceptions: ‘the national security of Hong Kong’, the ‘the NSL for Hong Kong’, and ‘enforcement’. The frequencies of these three terms increased after the law took effect.

⁴¹ Edmund Cheng, Francis Lee, Samson Yuen and Gary Tang, ‘Total Mobilization from Below: Hong Kong’s Freedom Summer’, China Quarterly 251, (2022), pp. 629–659.

⁴² Tom Kelleher and Barbara Miller, ‘Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11(2), (2006), pp. 395–414. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083–6101.2006.00019.x.

⁴³ The Chinese terms are: 移民; 英国海外居民签证; 英国海外居民护照; 居英权。.

⁴⁴ “Zhongfang buzai chengren! BNO huzhao jiujing shi sha? (China no longer recognizes it! What exactly is a BNO passport?), China Daily, https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202101/31/WS60163ff3a3101e7ce973d971.html.

⁴⁵ Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

⁴⁶ Natalie Wong, ‘British diplomat says BN(O) visa scheme for Hongkongers to stay at least until 2025 UK election’, South China Morning Post, May 4, 2023.

⁴⁷ Everett Lee, ‘A Theory of Migration’, Demography 3(1), (1996), pp. 47–57.

⁴⁸ Anita Chan, Lewis Cheung, Eric King-man Chong, Man Yee Karen Lee, and Mathew Wong, ‘Hong Kong’s new wave of migration: socio-political factors of individuals’ intention to emigrate’, Comparative Migration Studies 10(1), (2022), pp. 1–21.

⁴⁹ Francs Lee, and Chi-kit Chan, ‘Legalization of press control under democratic backsliding: The case of post-national security law Hong Kong’, Media, Culture, and Society 45(5), (2022), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01634437221140525?journalCode=mcsa.

⁵⁰ We used different methods to identify possible bots, and the number ranged from 82 to 294 possible bots. We conducted statistical results using these different numbers, and statistical results remain the same.

⁵¹ Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

⁵² Garth Taylor, ‘Pluralistic Ignorance and the Spiral of Silence: A Formal Analysis’, Public Opinion Quarterly, (3), (1982), pp. 311–335.

⁵³ Hong Kong Government, ‘Safeguarding National Security Bill to be gazetted tomorrow’, March 7, 2024. https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202403/07/P2024030700476.htm.

⁵⁴ ‘人定居內地，增幅几夸张？’ Hong Kong Commercial News [香港商报], July 12, 2022.

⁵⁵ ‘太火爆！733万香港人，这个暑假往深圳跑了900’, https://news.cqnews.net/1/detail/1146826109332672512/web/content_1146826109332672512.html.

⁵⁶ Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability and Change in the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

⁵⁷ ‘港人北上消费週末日志: 远离政治，在价廉食买玩中享乐’, November 9, 2023. https://theinitium.com/article/20231109-hongkong-heading-north-to-mainland.

⁵⁸ Cheng et. al., ‘Total Mobilization from Below’.