This research systematically examines the influence of cyber-protests using “the Diba Expeditions” as an example of cross-platform cyber-protests organized by grass-roots Chinese patriots. I collected three million comments from nine targeted Facebook pages during the Hong Kong anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. A supervised machine learning model distinguishes Diba’s comments from those of the ordinary Facebook users’. I use sentiment analysis to measure the attitudinal changes towards China and the Hong Kong Police. The Difference-in-difference regression models show that Diba expeditions are able to amplify the pro-China voices in the targeted pages, especially in the targeted anti-protest pages. As the first research aiming to demonstrate effect of Diba Expeditions, this...[ Read more ]

This research systematically examines the influence of cyber-protests using “the Diba Expeditions” as an example of cross-platform cyber-protests organized by grass-roots Chinese patriots. I collected three million comments from nine targeted Facebook pages during the Hong Kong anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement. A supervised machine learning model distinguishes Diba’s comments from those of the ordinary Facebook users’. I use sentiment analysis to measure the attitudinal changes towards China and the Hong Kong Police. The Difference-in-difference regression models show that Diba expeditions are able to amplify the pro-China voices in the targeted pages, especially in the targeted anti-protest pages. As the first research aiming to demonstrate effect of Diba Expeditions, this thesis reflects the trend of self-organized Chinese political events on Facebook and reveals the influential power of cyber-protests with no follow-up physical activity.