Research on Social Media Literacy: How College Students Use Weibo

Abstract

As a popular social media in China, Weibo is playing an essential role in dailylives of many college students. This paper investigates college students' use of Weibo to understand their social media literacy and and try to make some specific recommendations for improveing the social media literacy of college students. We conducted a survey with 321 students in Guangxi University from four aspects: the ability to access Weibo, to acquire information from Weibo, to analyze and evaluate Weibo, and to create Weibo. The findings can be summarized as follows: The behaviors on Weibo of college students tend to be rational in general; The information acquiring from Weibo tend to be entertainment and superficial; The college students are lacking in the ability to create Weibo; There are gaps in social media literacy between different majors.