The Pandemic across Platform Societies: Weibo and Twitter at the Outbreak of the Covid-19 Epidemic in China and the West

Abstract

Information and communication technologies occupy a central position in the Covid-19 pandemic. Public response has been deemed extremely important, with social media platforms playing a key role in both institutional and bottom-up information sharing processes. The emerging field of platform studies has shown that platforms increasingly influence how society works; however, such studies often adopt a highly Western-centric approach. By focusing on Twitter and Weibo use in the early stages of the pandemic, the paper presents an exploratory study that comparatively explores the role of the two platforms for both Western and Chinese publics. Our findings indicate that during the Covid-19 outbreak, Weibo worked as a propaganda tool to unite the Chinese people and promote public policies under the control of the government and the guidance of the mainstream media. Twitter functioned more like a public discourse platform open to personal expression, often showing the influence of defined partisan political discourses. We argue that the participatory dynamics characterizing Weibo and Twitter conversations at the outbreak of the pandemic at least partially mirrored the different 'platforms societies' currently developing in China and the West.

People from the U.S. and China think about their personal and collective future differently

“…Indeed, many Chinese participants listed phrases from Chinese Communist propaganda such as “the belt and road” and “build a community with a shared future for mankind” (D. Chen, 2019 ). Alternatively, restrictions on free speech might have caused participants to withhold negative future thoughts or listing positive future thoughts to be consistent with the official narrative of the Chinese government (Huang & Cruz, 2021 ; Wang & Mark, 2015 ; Yang & Vicari, 2021 ).…”

Personal Narrative under Nationalism: Chinese COVID-19 Vaccination Expressions on Douyin

“…Most of the current research on narratives about health-related behaviour on social media platforms focuses on static text and picture content [8,32,33], and ignores the recent rapid rise of short-video-sharing platforms, such as Douyin. Different social media dynamics could directly affect different content production, including the use of narrative [36]. Therefore, we cannot directly 'transplant' research results from Twitter and other platforms, which focus on static textual content, onto short-video-sharing platforms, especially given the non-Western context.…”

“#LongCOVID affects children too”: A Twitter analysis of healthcare workers’ sentiment and discourse about Long COVID in children and young people in the UK

“…31 The lack of up-to-date evidence on Long COVID in CYP prompted HCW to rely on using Twitter during the pandemic as a tool to communicate relevant information. 32 Twitter has a broad audience reach, is used as a communication tool by politicians, health bodies and other key influences, and facilitates real-time updates. 33 During the pandemic, HCWs, primarily those in frontline roles and local response coordinators, have often been challenged to become credible spokespersons for pandemic information.…”