Cyber violence is not a minority, but a mainstream online environment.
We look for recognition on the internet and will actively or passively enter the group of a certain viewpoint, and once we are in a group, the informa- tion we receive can easily be filtered and become one-sided. Through the reinforced between groups, our emotions were stimulated and amplified, and there is a risk that people’s views will become more and more extreme, leading to the thought that only their own opinion is correct and that they want to kill all other different opinions.

I always seen voices on the internet, which was many people thought that a certain platform has a terrible atmosphere and they are more vulnerable to cyber violence. What is interesting is, the same platform is considered by some to be bad and full of extreme views, but is meanwhile considered by others to be rational and even welcoming. I was thinking about different platforms might have different dominant views on ‘right’ and ‘normal’.

To figure out how grouping influence cyber violence, I designed a method of data analyzing. I searched for the same topic in same year on different plat- forms and categorised voices by opinions.

Each picture with small colour blocks is made up of 1281 real comments from the internet, with different colours representing different opinions. At the same time, I visualised datas from 5-7 years ago on the same platform for the same topic. These images give a realistic picture of the changes in main- stream opinion, the distribution of extreme views, number of cyber violence across China’s mainstream social medias, and you may be able to find out more by looking at these images in the exhibition.