How do English-Speaking Users Discuss the Wuhan Lockdown: A Longitudinal Analysis of Public Spheres on YouTube

Abstract

Drawing on Chantel Mouffe, Mikhail Bakhtin, Judith Butler and others, we examined how English-speaking YouTube users discussed the Wuhan lockdown from late January to June 2020. We argue that news-prompted public spheres are affective, contextualised and short-lived and our findings suggest that the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic outside of China is closely related to the worsening sentiments of English-speaking publics on YouTube. Comments are also significantly associated with the changing severity of the pandemic, reflecting the changing concerns of publics regardless of the central theme of news stories. The divergence of the sentiment scores of user comments is also salient among different media spaces. These findings suggest that a de-localised, universal global public sphere is misleading and more nuanced and contextualised studies are warranted.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• affective public spheres
• sentiment analysis
• YouTube
• lockdown

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We assume that the majority of them are non-Chinese given the fact that only very limited number of Chinese citizens have access to YouTube due to the block of China's internet firewall.

2 We are not arguing that issue-based public deliberation is impossible; typical examples include academic conferences, parliament debates, public hearings etc.

3 We do not deny the importance of drawing a boundary between the private and the public, which is increasingly becoming blurred with the digitalisation of people’s everyday and public life (see Splichal 2022a). The participant of a public sphere should be able to speak in a way that is acceptable and sound to the collective, connecting her/his position and interest with that of the general public. What we would like to stress is that it is impossible to bracket those personal interest, passion or believes.

4 https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus.

5 CGTN is an English-language news service channel run by China’s state media – China Central Television (CCTV), targeting the global audience.

6 Channel 4 is a UK public service broadcaster and Channel 4 news is its news programme.

7 DW is a Germany public state-owned international broadcaster.

8 SCMP is a Hong Kong based English-language newspaper owned by Alibaba.

9 See Appendix B for the update of the lexicon. The developer of Vader outlined the methods of adding new token of words at here: https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment/issues/59.

10 Please check the attachment for the change of lexicon.

11 The three authors coded the 19 videos. See Appendix A for detailed results.

12 A package for Natural Language Processing in Python, see https://www.nltk.org.

13 Calculation is based on the screen names of users. Given that some users may have used the same screen names (e.g. one or two letters), the proportion could be higher than 92.6%.

14 Already this movement has affected the newest comments on our sampled YouTube videos. The movement has also inspired new protests in China’s universities, such as the one in Wuhan University on 4 December 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [Grant number 2022M711201].

Notes on contributors

Xuanzi Xu

Xuanzi Xu is a research fellow at the School of Media and Communications, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Yuanbo Qiu

Yuanbo Qiu (corresponding author) is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou.

Huang Huang

Huang Huang is a post-doctoral fellow of Health Management and Policy at the College of Public Health, University of Kentucky.