Author: Yujia Liu

 
See and be Seen is a project that investigates the echo chamber phenomenon **in** the context of the Chinese social media environment. It focuses on how the public sphere of social media, such as “Weibo trending,” enables users to create online social influence with their posts, emotions and personal views. The weighted evaluation of Weibo trending, based on user interaction with posts, can easily cause view polarization. The ranking of posts and comments against a hashtag is decided by the calculation of interaction factors, which leads to the phenomenon that the most obvious messages and posts either share similar attitudes, or that the most extreme arguments cause controversy. This affects media ecology and the public opinion environment, including misinformation, cyberbullying, group polarization, etc. However, the interaction with posts is only reflected as numbers on Weibo. Invisible algorithmic rankings dictate which posts attract attention. Because of that, it is difficult for users to understand how their interaction with a post is increasing its exposure and popularity. Composed of a mobile-end interaction and a visualization website, *See and be Seen* aims for a creative perspective through which we can rethink the influence of Weibo’s interaction mechanism design on the visibility of each comment.

The interaction taking place on the mobile phone can trigger the animation on the webpage so that the connection between mobile-end and visualization webpage can make the influence more explicit and intuitive for the audience. It visualizes the influence of time, likes, and replies on the exposure of each comment under the trending hashtag. By scanning the QR code on the webpage, the audience can get access to the mobile-end part, which is a list of comments under the example hashtag. As the audience posts a new comment, there will appear a new house on the webpage. The earlier the comment, the more centered its position will be. The size and level of each house depends on likes and replies it receives.

When we use Weibo in our daily lives, we always take it for granted that some comments are more visible in the front row because they get more likes and comments, ignoring the decisive role of the algorithm. However, such a mechanism can induce the clickbait issues driven by the attention economy. It is common to see some accounts deliberately give controversial comments to stir emotions and attacks to earn more views, and there are many replies under this comment, making it more visible to others. If people learn about how the Weibo algorithm decides the exposure of each comment based on interaction index, they might reevaluate those comments with high ranks, and think twice before giving likes or replies. Instead of accepting the default order set by Weibo, which is sorting comments by popularity, users may see comments in reverse order to see a variety of different comments.