Evaluating the effect of Chinese universities’ public opinion governance strategies through online user comments on the Weibo platform

Purpose This study argues that online user comments on social media platforms provide feedback and evaluation functions. These functions can provide services for the relevant departments of organizations or institutions to formulate corresponding public opinion response strategies. Design/methodology/approach This study considers Chinese universities’ public opinion events on the Weibo platform as the research object. It collects online comments on Chinese universities’ network public opinion governance strategy texts on Weibo, constructs the sentiment index based on sentiment analysis and evaluates the effectiveness of the network public opinion governance strategy adopted by university officials. Findings This study found the following: First, a complete information release process can effectively improve the effect of public opinion governance strategies. Second, the effect of network public opinion governance strategies was significantly influenced by the type of public opinion event. Finally, the effect of public opinion governance strategies is closely related to the severity of punishment for the subjects involved. Research limitations/implications The theoretical contribution of this study lies in the application of image repair theory and strategies in the field of network public opinion governance, which further broadens the scope of the application of image repair theory and strategies. Originality/value This study expands online user comment research to network public opinion governance and provides a quantitative method for evaluating the effect of governance strategies. Peer review The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2022-0269