Open AccessCOVID-19 ACROSS PLATFORM SOCIETIES: EXPLORING THE PANDEMIC THROUGH WEIBO AND TWITTER
Author(s) -
Zheng Yang,
Stefania Vicari
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12264
Subject(s) - social media , mainstream , citizen journalism , pandemic , government (linguistics) , covid-19 , china , political science , public relations , politics , internet privacy , sociology , computer science , medicine , linguistics , philosophy , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law
Information and communication technologies occupy a central positionin the Covid-19 pandemic. Public response has been deemed extremely important, with socialmedia platforms playing a key role in both institutional and bottom-up information sharingprocesses. The emerging field of platform studies has shown that platforms increasinglyinfluence how society works; however, such studies often adopt a highly Western-centricapproach. By developing an exploration of Twitter and Weibo use in the early stages of thepandemic, this study provides a comparative investigation of the role of platforms insocieties. Our findings indicate that during the Covid-19 outbreak, Weibo worked as apropaganda tool to unite the Chinese people and promote public policies under the control ofthe government and the guidance of the mainstream media. Twitter functioned more like apublic discourse platform open to personal expression, often showing the influence ofdefined partisan political discourses. We argue that the participatory dynamicscharacterising Weibo and Twitter conversations at the outbreak of the pandemic at leastpartially mirrored the different ‘platforms societies’ currently developing in China and theWest.