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When COVID-19 first emerged in China, there was speculation that the outbreak would trigger public anger and weaken the Chinese regime. By analyzing millions of social media posts from Sina Weibo made between December 2019 and February 2020, we describe the contours of public, online discussions pertaining to COVID-19 in China. We find that discussions of COVID-19 became widespread on January 20, 2020, consisting primarily of personal reflections, opinions, updates, and appeals. We find that the largest bursts of discussion, which contain simultaneous spikes of criticism and support targeting the Chinese government, coincide with the January 23 lockdown of Wuhan and the February 7 death of Dr. Li Wenliang. Criticisms are directed at the government for perceived lack of action, incompetence, and wrongdoing—in particular, censoring information relevant to public welfare. Support is directed at the government for aggressive action and positive outcomes. As the crisis unfolds, the same events are interpreted differently by different people, with those who criticize focusing on the government’s shortcomings and those who praise focusing on the government’s actions.

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As fact-checking videos increasingly circulate on video-sharing platforms, more research is needed to understand the prevalent features of such videos and how they are associated with audience engagement. Drawing from the literature on fact-checking, communication, marketing, and computer science, we identified eight audiovisual features as well as seven persuasive strategies that are most relevant to fact-checking videos. Using a hybrid video analysis framework combining both automated and manual content analysis, we examined 4,309 fact-checking videos on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. We found that fact-checking videos on Douyin tended to have higher brightness, less cool color dominance, and faster tempo than non-fact-checking videos from the same accounts and Douyin Trending videos, and frequently used persuasive strategies like clickbait and humor. Through feature clustering, we established three types of fact-checking videos on Douyin—long storytelling cartoons, short stimulating videos, and short authoritative videos. We found that several audiovisual features and persuasive strategies were associated with audience engagement, such as likes, comments, and reshares. This study sheds light on the common practices of fact-checking videos in Chinese cyberspace, extends the current image-as-data paradigm to fact-checking videos, and helps fact-checkers make evidence-based decisions on content creation.