Constructing digital risk communities: A comparative analysis of official communication about the Covid-19 pandemic on Chinese and UK digital platforms

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Weibo and Twitter played distinct roles in promoting pandemic management strategies in China and the UK, respectively. This digital sociology study focuses on Covid-related discourses from official accounts on Weibo and Twitter to understand the intersection of governments and digital platforms during a health emergency. To achieve this, this study asks: RQ1: How and to what extent did governmental communication in China and the UK mobilise a discourse of risk through Weibo and Twitter respectively? Conceptually, to what extent does the notion of ‘risk’ help us understand government social media communication during Covid? RQ2: Which actions and actors were portrayed as responsible for the pandemic’s management? RQ3: How were nation-states and globalisation portrayed through discourses centred on vaccine research, development, and post-R&D distribution?

The study’s theoretical framework synthesises literature from the sociology of risk and digital platform studies. It draws upon Ulrich Beck’s conceptual development of ‘risk society’ and contemporary scholarship on risk, health, and society. Additionally, it incorporates concepts from platform studies, including ‘platformisation’, ‘platform regionality’, and ‘platform affordance’, which is supplemented by risk communication scholarship to understand audience perspectives. Methodologically, this study employs a qualitative and comparative design, applying thematic analysis on posts scraped from a dedicated list of official accounts, and supplementing approaches to examine non-verbal elements, particularly visuals.

Findings suggest that official discourses during Covid can be conceptualised as constructing ‘digital risk communities’, informed by key interventions including ‘risk society’, ‘digital risk society’, and ‘imagined communities’. Digital risk communities are virtual collectives constructed through official discourses, where governments as structures for collective risk management, along with experts and citizens, are framed as key actors in establishing provisional certainty to mitigate uncertainty surrounding Covid. The construction of these communities was further shaped by the politics of Weibo and Twitter.