Emotional Reactivation in Online Public Opinion on Social Media: A Case Study of the Viral “Malfoy” Phenomenon During the 2026 Spring Festival
Main Article Content
Keywords
online public opinion, emotional reactivation, social media, collective memory, emotional projection
Abstract
Social media has become the core field for the generation and dissemination of online public opinion. The emotional reactivation phenomenon behind the classic film and television symbols transcending time to trigger the online public opinion boom is the core research object of this study. This study takes the popular content related to the character “Malfoy” in the Harry Potter series during the Spring Festival of 2026 as a case. Focusing on the reasons and characteristics of the classic film and television symbols that trigger the emotional reactivation of online public opinion in the context of social media, based on the theory of emotional projection and the perspective of collective memory, it explains the two-way relationship between emotional reactivation and collective memory activation. The research adopts the text analysis method, and the core data comes from the text data of relevant topics on the Weibo platform.
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