The microblogging discourse of disasters: Twitter and Weibo in action in the aftermath of two major industrial accidents

ABSTRACT

This study explores how micro-bloggers react to disasters in social media by examining the discursive-semiotic activities activated in Twitter and Weibo in responding to the 2013 West explosion in the US and the 2015 Tianjin explosions in China. By analyzing 1322 Weibo posts and 1387 Twitter posts, the article shows how users of Twitter and Weibo mobilized alternative repertoires of representatives, expressives, directives, commissives and eliciting to make sense of disasters, in ways which in turn evoked a contrasting sense of communities of collective purpose. While the discourse of the 2013 West explosion reflected a strong sense of the creation, sharing and distribution of knowledge, as well as showing support and sympathy to the suffering, the discourse of the 2015 Tianjin explosions, displayed strong critical and oppositional properties that disrupted the official discourse of the accident. This study contributes not only to a better understanding of social media in disaster communication, but also to the methodologies for studying social media data in relation to disasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster communication
• discourse analysis
• Twitter
• the 2013 West explosion
• the 2015 Tianjin explosions
• Weibo

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by The Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Projects of Guangdong Province “广东省哲学社会科学规划2020年度青年项目” [grant number GD20YXW03] .

Notes on contributors

Xiaoping Wu

Xiaoping Wu is a post-doctoral fellow in the department of communication, University of Macau, China. She has published in Discourse Studies, Media, Culture & Society, Discourse, Context & Media, Language and Intercultural Communication and Babel in the areas of social media discourse studies, media and translation studies, and intercultural studies. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Discourse, Context & Media.

Martin Montgomery

Martin Montgomery is the author of several books including The Discourse of Broadcast News (Routledge, 2007) and Key Concepts in Language, Media and Culture (Routledge, 2018), as well as many journal articles in the field of language and communication. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Macau and is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde where he was once Director of the Scottish Centre for Journalism Studies.