False Consensus: The Violent Mechanisms, Flexible Traps, and Risk Governance of Fan-Circle Comment Manipulation

Fan circle comment control possesses both violent attributes and flexible features. On the one hand, fan groups build a sense of belonging within their circle through emotional identification, relying on the hierarchical organizational structure of the fan circle and the algorithmic recommendation mechanism of the platform’s comment section to form a kind of online soft violence that suppresses dissenting opinions. On the other hand, it adopts a flexible strategy to avoid direct conflicts, which is specifically manifested in standardized praise templates, encrypted pseudo-symbols, and the creation of fictional bystander perspectives and other flexible tactics. The fanatical comment control in the fan circle leads to three major risks: disorder in the online public space, the breach of legal boundaries, and the distortion of the values of teenagers. In governance, a simplistic and brutal “one-size-fits-all” approach should be avoided. Instead, on the basis of protecting the legitimate comment freedom of the fan circle group, the algorithm for displaying popular comments in the comment section should be optimized, and the chaos of fan circle comment control should be classified and governed; the construction of the rule of law and long-term supervision should be strengthened; and the subjectivity construction of the fan group should be guided to rebuild a rational communication ecosystem in the comment section as a public space.