Abstract
The article examines how citizens use framing strategies to influence collaborative planning through social media in an authoritarian context. Using the Big Banyan Tree controversy in Guangzhou, it combines word co-occurrence networks with BERT-based semantic clustering to identify how frames become visible, circulate, and align. The findings show that digitally mediated framing can mobilise sentiment, challenge official narratives, and generate bottom-up discursive power within a networked public sphere.