Gaining Discursive Power through Framing: Citizens’ Strategic Use of Social Media in Collaborative Planning

Social media platforms have facilitated rapid information flow and new forms of power relations between citizens, governments, and other actors in collaborative planning processes. Citizens utilize retweets and comments to amplify planning issues they care about, sparking controversies and shaping discourse that affect power relations. This chapter explores how shifts in power relations occur through citizens using framing strategies and enhancing discursive legitimacy in online interactions. Posts and comments data related to the Big Banyan Tree controversy in Guangzhou were collected from Weibo, a leading Chinese social media platform. A 3A (social network analysis—SNA, sentiment analysis—SA, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation—LDA) analytical framework is developed to identify the shift of discursive power by interaction, emotion, and content in social media. This study examines how citizen discourse in planning controversies informally challenges traditional power structures. The findings indicate that citizens establish and expand discursive legitimacy through the proliferation of topics in the networked public sphere, facilitated by continuous online interactions. Such online citizen actions create a multi-thematic information network, addressing critical issues like economic gain, central-local relations, place attachment, and landscape function to question irrational planning decisions. Additionally, this study identifies four citizen strategies on social media: Cross-platform forwarding, forwarding without comments, accumulative forwarding, and posting original images.