The Premiere Judgment: The Contagion and Unification of Feminist Interpretations in Cyberspace

Cyberspace, as a form of public sphere, has long been debated by scholars regarding its potential benefits for social movements. This paper posits that social media, through the mechanism of social contagion, can lead individuals who pay attention to a particular issue to develop a collective ideological interpretation of it, thereby facilitating social movements. Using the "Anatomy of a Fall" film premiere as a case of an online feminist movement, this study collects textual data from the social media platform Weibo to examine how public interpretations of the event evolved over time on the platform. Through corpus analysis, I found that people gradually ascribed a unified, collectively shared feminist interpretation to the event. Even users who initially did not approach the incident from a feminist perspective increasingly connected it with feminism as the discussion unfolded. These findings may shed light on how highly unified opinions emerge in cyberspace and the role that online spaces play in shaping ideology within social movements.