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Background: According to the Seventh National Census, China's fertility rate is less than 1.5, marking a significant national issue with potential risks. To counter this low birth rate, the Chinese government has relaxed family planning policies and introduced supportive measures. Purpose: Changes in birth policy have attracted considerable attention from the people of China. This article aims to study the public's response to the three-child support policy using Weibo as a window. The goal is to provide a more balanced evaluation of current perspectives, enabling policymakers to formulate better fertility information, particularly when anticipating a poor public response to controversial policies. Methodology: This research uses a crawler to gather data from Sina Weibo. Through opinion mining of Weibo posts on the three-child policy, Weibo users' online opinions on the three-child policy are analyzed from two perspectives: their attention content and sentiment tendency. Using an interrupted time series, it examines changes in online views on the policy, matching policy documents to the time nodes of Weibo posts. Findings: The public has shown great interest in and provided short-term positive feedback on policies related to improving maternity insurance, birth rewards, and housing subsidies. In contrast, there has been a continuous negative response to policies such as extending maternity leave, which has particularly sparked concerns among women regarding future employment and marital rights protection. On social media, the public's attention to the three-child birth policy has focused mainly on the protection of women's rights, especially legal rights after childbirth, and issues related to physical and mental health. Child-rearing support and economic pressure are also hot topics, involving the daily expenses of multichild families, childcare services, and housing pressure. However, this study also revealed that infertile or single women express a strong desire to have children, but due to limitations in the personal medical insurance system, this desire has not been fully satisfied. Contributions: Our study demonstrates the feasibility of a rapid and flexible method for evaluating the public response to various three-child supportive policies in China using near real-time social media data. This information can help policy makers anticipate public responses to future pandemic three-child policies and ensure that adequate resources are dedicated to addressing increases in negative sentiment and levels of disagreement in the face of scientifically informed but controversial, restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, hot issues are likely become bipolar or multipolar after heated discussion on the Internet. This article is focused on the study of the polarization phenomenon and establishes a public opinion polarization model with the considerations of individual heterogeneity and dynamic conformity. At first, this article introduces the dynamic changing function of an individual's conformity tendency to other's attitudes in the interaction process. It further defines the influential weight between different interactive individuals, and expands the interactive individual from complete homogeneity to initial attitude heterogeneity, and finally, conformity heterogeneity. Then, through simulation experiments, we find that the degree of changing in individual attitude is limited. That is, it is difficult for the individuals who have one directional attitude at the initial time to change into another opposite attitude through interaction. In addition, individuals with low conformity within a certain threshold are more likely to form polarization. Finally, the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed model are verified by the typical case "Mimeng Event". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of information technology, the Internet has become an important channel of public opinion for expressing public interests, emotion, and ideas. Public emergency usually spreads via network. Due to the temporal and spatial flexibility and the information amplification of network, the opinions from different regions and background are easy to be represented as network public opinion, and have important impact on social and economic life. Thus, studying the formation mechanism of network public opinion has important theoretical and practical significance. Taking the formation process of network public opinion under emergencies as the research object, this paper first identifies the key factors influencing the formation of network public opinion, namely the internal characteristics (include individual education level, individual stubbornness, individual initial opinion, and so on) and external information of individuals (include external information intensity). Second, information intensity is introduced to describe the influence of external information feature on the formation of network public opinion. Individual education level, individual stubbornness, and individual initial opinion are analyzed to describe the influence of individual internal factors on the formation, and then its model is constructed. Through the simulation experiments, this paper analyzes the influence of external information intensity, individual education level, individual stubbornness, individual initial opinion, and other factors on the formation of network public opinion. The simulation results show that: (1) the greater intensity of public emergency reporting causes the easier formation of network public opinion; (2) the higher individual education level leads to the shorter time for completing the final formation and stable state of online public opinions, and after the formation of online public opinions, the opinion of the event is mainly neutral; (3) the greater individual's stubbornness makes the shorter formation time of online public opinion. When online public opinion reaches a stable state, the neutral opinion group dominates and firmly controls the development trend of public opinion; (4) the difference of opinions among individuals is the most important factor affecting the formation of network public opinion. Finally, the rationality and validity of the proposed model are verified by a real case. Compared with previous studies on the formation mechanism of network public opinion, this paper divides the formation process of network public opinion into three stages: individual information perception, individual decision making, and individual opinion transmission. Meanwhile, the influence of individual internal factors and external information characteristics on the formation process of network public opinion is also considered., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)