Some answers were encouraging. Others we did not see coming.

At the end of 2018, QDaily put out a survey to find out "how we engage with public topics today." That short phrase raises quite a few questions. Who is "we," for instance? What does "public topics" mean to different kinds of people? And that is before you get to the details of how people actually take part.

We ran the survey precisely because we wanted the answers.

"Public topics" is not a phrase people say often, but thanks to social networks, running into them has become far too easy. The New York Times reported on a man named Erik Hagerman, who decided the moment the U.S. presidential election ended that he would stop reading anything about politics, and chose a life of "knowing nothing" in the Trump era. He banned himself from discussing current events with friends, banned himself from social apps, and looked only at the weather forecast. James Comey, Russia, the travel ban, alternative facts, pussyhats, the "big nuclear button" — he knew none of it. "My emotional health is better than it's ever been," said this man who had withdrawn completely from public discussion.

Leaving social networks entirely is harder in China, largely because so many people's social ties overlap heavily with their social networks. Something happens, and within a very short span you may be informed of it one channel at a time — official media, gossip in your WeChat Moments, a trending push from an official account, comments reposted across all kinds of sites. Yet, oddly, you may also know nothing about it at all, simply because it falls outside your own filter bubble, even if it has already caused an uproar for everyone else. And of course we often face another situation here: something happens, then it disappears, and across the vastness of the internet you cannot find a trace of it unless you dig.

Public topics do not necessarily give rise to public consciousness. A pimple festering on your nose will hold your attention more easily than a group of children far away with no school to attend. That is human nature, not coldheartedness. It is the natural advantage the concrete and immediate holds over the abstract and distant.

Step back further. In the education most people receive growing up, speaking out in public — or building a framework for understanding a public event — was never on the agenda. A huge population that was neither encouraged to take part in public topics nor taught how has now been swept into the internet, consuming all kinds of public topics anytime, anywhere, or being consumed by them, under the flattering label "the melon-eating masses" — Chinese internet slang for bystanders who watch the show without joining in.

Everything the melon-eating masses know, they learned in combat. Combat is not an exaggeration: the anger that discussion on social networks stirs up is a match for face-to-face conflict; to break into any of the various hidden cliques you first have to learn a whole set of insider slang; your sense of identity may have nothing to do with your social status, but your attitude and your stance had better be on the same side as everyone else's...

A large part of the QDaily Research Lab's day-to-day observation revolves around exactly this. Now we wanted something plainer: how do we engage with public topics today.

This online survey drew 4,444 valid responses (the number looks suspicious, but it is real). The respondents overlap heavily with QDaily's own audience: more than 80 percent were young people aged 19 to 29, nearly 70 percent held a bachelor's degree, and most lived in first- and second-tier cities. For reasons unknown to us, women were the majority.

Below are the results, along with some observations of our own.

What Do You Think Counts as a Public Topic?

In our survey, people overwhelmingly agreed — more than 80 percent of them — that a public topic is "something that concerns the interests of a group and affects society." But on what actually counts as a public topic, there was no shared standard.

In Weibo's year-end ranking of hot topics, the hashtag #ZhaoLiyingAndFengShaofengGetMarried# drew 5.72 billion views. In our results, more than a third of respondents said entertainment topics such as "Xue Zhiqian's affair" or "an internet-famous cat being cute" do not count as public topics.

Among the topics that flooded social networks in 2018, the specifics varied by platform, but film, television and entertainment were among the most engaged-with topics on Weibo, WeChat and Zhihu alike. Story of Yanxi Palace drew 13.8 billion views on Weibo and more than 119,000 discussion articles on WeChat. Dying to Survive was Zhihu's hottest search term of the year, and produced more than 97,000 related articles on WeChat. On Weibo, the topic "Idol Producer, Produce 101" drew engagement of 31.6 billion.

Here are the public topics QDaily's respondents said they had engaged with:

Asked "Besides the above, which event did you care about or engage with the most in 2018?", respondents named these topics most often:

• MeToo and sexual assault (613 mentions)

• the Tianyi case (347)
• tax reform (226)
• the trade war (233)
• the constitutional amendment (129)
• Jin Yong's death (73)
• vaccines (71)
• domestic violence (65)
• the Liu Qiangdong (Richard Liu) sexual assault case (65)
• the Jiang Ge case (57)
• the RYB kindergarten scandal (52)

When Do We Take Part in Public Topics, and When Do We Not?

In an earlier QDaily Research Lab survey, nearly a third of 8,113 respondents said that on public topics they were pure melon-eating masses: they stopped at "read," watched in silence, and did not discuss, push back or repost.

But saying nothing is itself a kind of saying, and existing as an information terminal is itself a kind of participation. As we said at the start, as long as you are on a social network it is hard to receive no news about public topics at all. Even offline conversation accounted for a third of how people learned about them.

Young people everywhere are indeed cool toward politics now. Compared with the previous generation, this one cares more about the economy, work and daily life. Some have no chance to take part politically under government controls; others simply have their attention taken up by entertainment and consumption. Japan's "relaxed generation" believes voting cannot change anything, so its willingness to engage politically is low; young Vietnamese do not have many chances to take part in politics, so they are not keen on it either. A 2018 survey by the U.S.-based Public Religion Research Institute also found that nearly half of young people had taken part in no political activity in the previous 12 months, against fewer than 40 percent of older people.

Around the world, more and more people are made anxious by the volume of bad news they read, catch what has been called "bad news fatigue," and then avoid the news altogether. Now that everyone is speaking and information is exploding, quite a few people have begun to demand a "right not to know." Google, for its part, added a "Tell Me Something Good" feature to its voice assistant, which pushes you good-news stories so you can catch your breath.

News, especially bad news, is produced constantly and spreads fast, and that provokes anger, fear and frustration. A report on college students' news consumption, produced jointly by the Knight Foundation and the Association of College and Research Libraries, found that 51 percent of college students could not tell which news mattered, and 68 percent felt overloaded with information.

So why are we still willing to engage with public topics? Judging by the results, not simply because "this concerns me."

The spread of "bad news fatigue" shows precisely that attention to public topics has not fallen at all, and may already be too high. Where 2016 gave us "the clueless melon-eating masses," 2018 brought internet phrases like "hard evidence" and "waiting for the plot twist." Even while still watching from the sidelines, the melon-eating masses now ask more of the facts of a story, and want to see the confirmed truth arrive the way you want a drama to reach its final episode.

On social networks where everyone speaks and fake news runs rampant, the main reason people hold back their opinions is that they feel they do not know enough about the event or the relevant expertise, and they are afraid of being led by the nose — in 2018, the frequency of that phrase on the WeChat Index rose 365 percent month over month. People's attitudes toward public events have not grown more indifferent. They have grown more careful.

And although the belief that "netizens have short memories" is deeply held, in a QDaily Research Lab survey, only 6.3 percent of people said that once a public topic loses momentum they never search for updates on it. The great majority stay interested in public events and want to know what happened next. It is just that their memory of one event is easily written over by newer ones — and then, when a similar event comes along, people remember the public events they had "forgotten."

When We Engage With Public Topics, Where Do We Place Our Trust?

2018 was a year in which the space for public discussion contracted sharply. Weibo introduced a platform-wide muting policy that lets verified Big V accounts mute their followers; the Cyberspace Administration of China closed 110,000 self-media accounts across platforms in a campaign against "eight kinds of online chaos"; WeChat twice cut the cap on official accounts an individual may register, from five to two to one, while the number a company may register fell from 50 to five. The right to speak that the internet once handed individuals is being taken back.

On the other hand, individuals and independent media had more impact in 2018 than ever: Shou Ye published The King of Vaccines on his WeChat official account, exposing the story behind 650,000 substandard vaccine doses; Cui Yongyuan revealed the actress Fan Bingbing's "yin-yang contracts" on Weibo; Dingxiang Doctor published "The 10-Billion-Yuan Health-Supplement Empire Quanjian, and the Chinese Families in Its Shadow," pointing straight at Quanjian's pyramid-scheme fraud; and China's #MeToo movement relied mainly on individuals and new media speaking out on social networks.

Trust in the media, meanwhile, has fallen broadly. In the United States, a survey released by Gallup and the Knight Foundation in September 2018 found that 70 percent of Americans trusted the media less than they had a decade earlier. In China, traditional media holding state licenses has been stigmatized much as "public intellectuals" have. In the QDaily Research Lab survey, only a third of respondents rated news media as highly credible, 13 percentage points below the share who said they trust the Big V experts in a given field more.

What Happens to Us When We Engage With Public Topics?

We usually think of being doxxed as a serious thing, but the odds of it happening are not that high. Having your account nuked or your posts deleted turns out to be far more common. In this survey, nearly a third of respondents had had comments deleted, and more than a third said they had met with online abuse.

The "gangjing" — the person who argues for the sake of arguing — which spread widely from March 2018, marks another stage in the history of online trolling under the general drift toward entertainment. The internet has never lacked emotional dissent. In the traditional order of speech, which prized seniority and rank, a person had to wait until a certain age or status before earning the right to speak: deference to elders and to seniority, obedience as maturity, talking back as rebellion. Once that person breaks free of those power relations and enters the online order, the right to speak arrives before any settled sense of public life, and so they rush to negate others as a way of giving themselves a sense of power.

The difference is that the "keyboard warriors" of the Tieba era trolled in the name of upholding justice, banding together on their own to hand out coordinated online punishment. As the post-80s generation, raised on a plain sense of right and wrong, entered their thirties, the angry young men who had looked up to Han Han as a spiritual idol gradually disappeared. The younger post-90s generation may still rebel, but the target of the rebellion has blurred, and it can no longer muster a troll army on the scale of the "6/9 Holy War."

The rise of livestreaming and bullet comments turned trolling into pure carnival. The trolls of the Tieba era are today's livestream hype fans. People treat trolling as fun and prize technique and flair; the old slogan "the holy war goes on as long as the brain-dead live" has given way to hype-fan catchphrases — "Chen Duxiu," "I'm zen about it," "unbelievable," "referee, please don't play in the match." Trolling no longer needs the banner of justice.

One explanation is that anger brings traffic to platforms and advertisers, and people's anger is remarkably easy to steer and exploit.

On social media, messages with strong moral or emotional coloring travel more easily. A New York University study found that each additional moral or emotional word in a tweet raised its chance of being retweeted by 20 percent. Condemning wrongdoing helps display your own righteousness; setting up a common enemy quickly rouses group feeling and gathers allies; and the likes and reposts those allies send back add to your sense of accomplishment.

Our Climate for Public Discussion Gets a Failing Grade

The survey found that 80 percent of respondents graded the climate of public discussion a failure — below 6 out of 10. Given the experiences above, that score is no surprise.

We would like to add a few further observations.

Besides gaming and anime slang continuing to seep into everyday speech, Chinese internet culture in 2018 also went through a large-scale invasion of fandom vocabulary: "C-position," "pick," "rainbow flattery," "ky." Talent shows brought fandom culture and idol worship into much wider view; things got popular enough to break out of their bubble, and even people who watch no entertainment shows found themselves "reposting this Yang Chaoyue." Short video sped up the shift of catchphrases from "coming from established influencers and Big Vs" to "anyone can go viral." Memes that once stayed inside one platform and in-jokes that small circles kept to themselves — the Huanong Brothers, Chef Wang Gang, Peppa Pig — crossed platforms too, carried by people's appetite for imitating, reposting and remixing.

Internet buzzwords are also becoming entertainment through and through. Ten years ago they came mostly from social news: "hide-and-seek death," "the crumbling building," "70 km/h," "Fan the Runner," "being suicided," "my dad is Li Gang," "well, I believe it anyway." Personal social networks then carried, in public opinion, the mission that "onlookers change China."

After 2011, WeChat launched and attention shifted from the public sphere to the circle of acquaintances. Fewer social hot buttons made it into the popular vocabulary, and more of the language expressed personal feeling: "awesome," "what a rip-off, Dad," "I can't take it," "I'm speechless," "I'm not okay at all."

After 2015, Chinese mobile games became mainstream in the internet market, and gaming terms — "useless teammate," "NPC," "solo," "hacking," "insta-kill," "combat power five, trash" — became part of young people's everyday dictionary.

After "onlookers change China" came "algorithms change what onlookers see": recommendation feeds and trending-topic lists filled up with entertainment.

By 2018, the hottest internet buzzwords came almost entirely from entertainment. "Cheesy pickup lines" and "C-position" came from the talent shows Idol Producer and Produce 101, "official announcement" from celebrity weddings, "skr" from the rap show The Rap of China, "it's over" from the idol drama Eternal Love, "big pig trotter" from Story of Yanxi Palace...

Buzzwords are not the only thing. The various forms of pointed social criticism that used to exist have also, to different degrees, been co-opted. "Deconstruction" has become the mainstream way for an individual to push back against authority. The "Liu Studies" craze that arrived at the end of the year is the textbook case of this deconstructive criticism: the charge that Liu Xiaolingtong had monopolized the discourse around Journey to the West, over-promoted himself and made bad-faith claims about his own legacy was turned, through copy-paste-style remixing, into carnival mockery.

But this resistance, its critical force dissolved, did no great damage to Liu Xiaolingtong's commercial activities in the end. It may even have been his best advertising. In an era where traffic is king, critical voices of every kind, swept along by the language of entertainment, ended up as anti-fans who only raised his profile. The success of Roast!, a show that launders reputations through self-mockery, is another miniature of how entertainment now dissolves criticism. The plain standards of right and wrong that used to exist are blurring under entertainment's sugar-coated bullets.

The right to speak on social platforms is also increasingly fixed within particular groups, and because members of other groups are absent from the conversation, a small-circle political correctness has begun to form. On social networks where young people hold the discourse, there is a kind of tyranny of the majority aimed at the old and the young: every old person is faking a fall to extort you, every child is a brat. Because adults have run into unreasonable children in real life and have no effective way to handle them, being anti-brat has gradually won acceptance in adult circles made up mostly of single people, and has become a political correctness — and, like all political correctness, it has begun to go too far. It has gone from complaining about brats, to quietly condoning a beating for them, to cheering elaborate violence against them.

Another example: as the economy grew and more people got rich, in places where the middle class controls the mainstream conversation, hatred of the rich has started turning into hatred of the poor. Where elites are dense on the ground, whenever a case of violence against hospital staff breaks out, the reflex is to side with the doctors and blame the patient, on the assumption that the patient is some unreasonable troublemaker from a poor, backward place who extorts hospitals for a living.

What Can We Do?

Over the past year we discussed a series of methods for "how to have an argument worth having": how to deal with disagreement, how to treat victims, how to avoid the logical traps of public discussion, and how to hold rational public discussion from the standpoint of relationships.

In an age of pervasive self-censorship, we hold in respect those individuals and organizations that still hold fast to universal values and to the truth. What we face as individuals is the disappearance of one clear boundary after another: between fact and opinion, between public and private, between joking and irony. Neither authority nor seriousness escapes being deconstructed into something merely "fun." Now that everyone is speaking, it grows harder and harder to tell what matters and what is true.

That does not mean people do not want to see facts and truth. As we said in an earlier Debate piece, people are not tired of the truth; they are worn down by everything it costs to chase it. That is also why the survey found people still hope someone in a discussion can persuade them by laying out the facts.

As for how to disagree with someone, we have written a very useful piece that breaks disagreement into seven levels.

Broad consensus may be very hard to reach now, but we have also seen that when a public event happens, many people share their views and the facts they know from different angles. If that sharing can settle, after discussion, into even the tiniest bit of consensus for the better, then we have moved forward by that tiny step.

There are a few habits we would like to share with you:

1. Do not treat self-censorship as a given, or get used to it.

2. Take responsibility for the information you repost and pass on: if you find you were wrong, admit it, correct it, and update what you hold to be true.

3. Tell fact from opinion, correct factual errors, and do not force agreement on opinions.

4. Stay alert to your own feelings and examine where your anger comes from. Be more careful with anger aimed at an individual, do not let your anger be used by others, and do not join an online pile-on without noticing.

Finally, we hope we can all stay kind to this world, and keep a clear head.

All charts by Zheng Shuya.