Exploring the Relationship Between Online Public Opinion, User Discourse, and Social Bot Production and Information Dissemination

The advent of the digital age and the subsequent rise of the Internet have greatly impacted the relationship between online opinion and user discourse in the early evolution of traditional media. However, it has introduced new challenges, namely the emergence of social bots that generate and disseminate information that aims to influence public opinion. Thus, the paper attempts to decipher whether online public opinion, user discourse, and the positions of social robots in the production and dissemination of information will reinforce or change each other. Through the adoption of questionnaire survey method, 414 Internet users who understand and have contacted the human-computer account on Douyin platform as the survey object, online questionnaire survey, it screens out 414 effective questionnaires for data analysis. Besides, the samples are analyzed for reliability, correlation, exploratory factor analysis (validity analysis), linear regression analysis (mediated effects analysis), and analysis of variance using the SPSS (Statistical Product Service Solutions) tool, and the data are obtained. At the same time, combined with text analysis in qualitative research, semiotic analysis is mainly used to analyze how sample data conveys the relationship between online public opinion, user discourse, and social robots. On this basis, the results indicate that all five hypotheses presented in the paper are verified, and two new relationships are explored.