Hashtag framing and stakeholder targeting: An affordance perspective on China’s digital public diplomacy campaign during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Social media platforms such as Twitter provide opportunities for governments to connect to foreign publics and influence global public opinion. In the current study, we used social and semantic network analysis to investigate China’s digital public diplomacy campaign during COVID-19. Our results show that Chinese state-affiliated media and diplomatic accounts created hashtag frames and targeted stakeholders to challenge the United States or to cooperate with other countries and international organizations, especially the World Health Organization. Telling China’s stories was the central theme of the digital campaign. From the perspective of social media platform affordance, we addressed the lack of attention paid to hashtag framing and stakeholder targeting in the public diplomacy literature.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• China
• public diplomacy
• network analysis
• Twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant [#CUC21GB009]; and the National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder [NSF Award #1841338].

Notes on contributors

Rui Wang

Rui Wang (Ph.D., Louisiana State University, USA) is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Communication Studies at the Communication University of China (Beijing, China). His research interests include social media and society, international communication, and digital public diplomacy. Email: [email protected]

Weiai Wayne Xu

Weiai Wayne Xu (Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo, USA) is an Associate Professor of Communication at University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA). His research applies computational methods to study technology’s role in the flow of information, value, and resources in empowering and disrupting the civil society. He is the author of over twenty five peer-reviewed journal articles in Digital Journalism, International Journal of Communication, American Behavioral Scientist, Computers in Human Behavior, Telematics and Informatics, and others. Email: [email protected]