IntroductionSocial media infuses modern relationships with vitality and brings a series of information dissemination with subjective consciousness. Studies have indicated that official Chinese media channels are transforming their communication style from didactic hard persuasion to softened emotional management in the digital era. However, previous studies have rarely provided valid empirical evidence for the communicational transformation. The study fills the gap by providing a longitudinal time-series analysis to reveal the pattern of communication of Chinese digital Chinese official media from 2019 to 2022.MethodThe study crawler collected 43,259 posts from the People’s Daily’s Weibo account from 2019 to 2021. The study analyzed the textual data with using trained artificial intelligence models.ResultsThis study explored the practices of the People’s Daily’s Weibo account from 2019 to 2021, COVID-19 is hardly normalized as it is still used as the justification for extraordinary measures in China. This study confirmed that People’s Daily’s Weibo account posts are undergoing softenization transformation, with the use of soft news, positive energy promotion, and the embedding of sentiment. Although the outburst of COVID-19 temporarily increased the media’s use of hard news, it only occur at the initial stage of the pandemic. Emotional posts occupy a nonnegligible amount of the People’s Daily Weibo content. However, the majority of posts are emotionally neutral and contribute to shaping the authoritative image of the party press.DiscussionOverall, the People’s Daily has softened their communication style on digital platforms and used emotional mobilization, distraction, and timely information provision to balance the political logic of building an authoritative media agency and the media logic of constructing audience relevance.

The doctrine of ‘best interests of the child’ has guided courts in determining post-divorce child custody cases in Taiwan since 1996 amendments to the Civil Code. Amended Article 1055-1 requires judges to consider factors such as ‘the age, sex, and wishes of the child’ and ‘the age, occupation, character, health condition, economic condition, and lifestyle of the parents.’ However, previous studies have not clarified which factors judges consider primary. This article collects Taiwanese family court decisions from 2012 to 2017, involving 1,126 children whose parents were both Taiwanese and who both sought to acquire custody, in which Taiwanese district courts granted sole custody to the husband or wife. The article employs decision tree methodology, a commonly used machine learning technology. The article concludes that the three most significant factors considered by Taiwanese judges are first, which parent is the child's current primary caregiver, followed by the wishes of the child and the judge's assessment of parent-child interaction. This result runs counter to widely held beliefs that parental gender and parents’ occupations and economic resources are still prime factors in judges’ contemplation. Decision tree learning, we suggest, can assist parents’ and lawyers’ case evaluations and speed up extrajudicial custody determination arrangements.

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