Captivated but threatened by ethnosexuality: decoding online hate speech on interracial marriage in China

Interracial marriage has increasingly gained visibility on Chinese social media platforms, especially African-Chinese marriage which has been popularly represented, sparking heated discussions publically. However, although several studies have touched upon interracial marriage with analyses through political and geographical lenses, few studies investigated the media representations and mediated comments towards African-Chinese marriage in China as it has become a hot topic on Chinese social media platforms recently. To fill this niche, this study explores how African-Chinese marriage is represented on Chinese social media through mediated public comments, and what ideological implication of represented subjectivity of male and female in African-Chinese marriage. Through feminist critical discourse analysis and intersectional perspective, it found that ambivalent masculinity and constant femininity are constructed in African-Chinese marriage through comments where Chinese males are predominantly represented as positive figures, while African men are greatly dehumanised and criticised. As for women, although public attitudes are distinctive towards Chinese and African women, they, sharing the collective identity of females, are restricted in the traditional conception of gender dichotomy. Finally, the social contextualisation of such representations and potential ideological implications will be generally discussed.

By analyzing Douyin users’ mediated interactions with interracial couples in everyday contexts, this paper addresses the convergence of anti-blackness and domestic gender tension on Chinese social media. It introduces the perspective of ‘multiple triangulations’ to examine discussions of four types of interracial relationships on Douyin: black women and Chinese men, black men and Chinese women, white women and Chinese men, and white men and Chinese women. This approach complicates explanations of why Chinese social media users have been rejecting blackness in a potentially mixed-race China in relation to whiteness and Chineseness. It also illuminates how they have encoded gender tension in marriages in China into anti-black discourses. Additionally, this research highlights the race-blind digital infrastructure and the dynamic connotations of anti-black racism in contemporary China.

Based on the case of Bilibili, a popular Chinese video-sharing social media with a core focus on animation, comic, game and novel, this article examines the transnational prosumption practices of Chinese urban youth who mostly belong to Generation Z. I conduct ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with animation, comic, game and novel fans to investigate the construction of heterotopia on Bilibili through their various practices of tactical prosumption. This article demonstrates that young animation, comic, game and novel fans prosume, socialise and express themselves in a tactical and poetic way within the heterotopia, a place of otherness. Various tactics are employed to challenge and counter control, social norms as well as consumerism. Starting with a critical engagement with Azuma’s pessimistic view on animation, comic, game and novel fan culture, the notion of ‘database animals’, I argue that a neglected, albeit nuanced, poetic and tactical prosumption process is evident on Chinese social media. Being the results of an interdisciplinary study, the findings will be helpful to scholars who are interested in contemporary Chinese studies with a focus on the animation industry, fandom, consumption and social media.

This study statistically analyzed survey data to examine the relationship between fulfillment of psychological needs of 223 Chinese sojourners in the United States and their online self-presentation strategies on Chinese and American social media. The results showed that the combined use of proactive and defensive self-presentation strategies on Chinese social media instead of American social media were more effective to fulfill the sojourners’ need for autonomy. Moreover, presentation strategies that helped to meet the sojourners’ need for relatedness were significantly different between Chinese and American social media. Specifically, a proactive strategy was more effective to meet sojourners’ need for relatedness on Chinese social media, while a defensive strategy was more effective to fulfill their need for relatedness on American social media.

This paper examines the differences of design between Chinese and western social media. Using a blandness in society of Francis Jullien's interpretation approach, this paper analyzes the mainstream social media, found that both Chinese and western social media design concept have the characteristic of being pleasing to the taste as new wine in terms of social communication; comparing to western social media, the Chinese social media have traces of being bland as water.

Reaching for the stars: DingTalk and the Multi-platform creativity of a ‘one-star’ campaign on Chinese social media

This chapter aims to investigate the extent to which English is used in Chinese social media. It reviews relevant literature regarding the use of English in China more generally and the use of English in Chinese social media which challenges standard English language ideology and gives rise to awareness of the “playfulness” of “new Chinglish”. In addition, the use of English in digital media reinforces the role of English in intra-national communication in China. The chapter explores the extent to which English is used by Chinese bilingual users of English in Chinese social media; and the salient features and relevant issues in relation to the use of English in Chinese social media. The use of English in Chinese social media involves Chinese “users” of English. The conventional use of English in Chinese social media includes the functional use of common English words and sentences.

Growing interest in social events on social media came along with the rapid development of the Internet. Social events that occur in the "real" world can spread on social media (e.g., Sina Weibo) rapidly, which may trigger severe consequences and thus require the government's timely attention and responses. This article proposes to predict the trends of social events on Sina Weibo, which is currently the most popular social media in China. Based on the theories of social psychology and communication sciences, we extract an unprecedented amount of comprehensive and effective features that relate to the trends of social events on Chinese social media, and we construct the trends of prediction models by using three classical regression algorithms. We found that lasso regression performed better with the precision 0.78 and the recall 0.88. The results of our experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Hate speech is plaguing the cyberspace along with user-generated content. Adding counter speech has become an effective way to combat hate speech online. Existing datasets and models target either (a) hate speech or (b) hate and counter speech but disregard the context. This paper investigates the role of context in the annotation and detection of online hate and counter speech, where context is defined as the preceding comment in a conversation thread. We created a context-aware dataset for a 3-way classification task on Reddit comments: hate speech, counter speech, or neutral. Our analyses indicate that context is critical to identify hate and counter speech: human judgments change for most comments depending on whether we show annotators the context. A linguistic analysis draws insights into the language people use to express hate and counter speech. Experimental results show that neural networks obtain significantly better results if context is taken into account. We also present qualitative error analyses shedding light into (a) when and why context is beneficial and (b) the remaining errors made by our best model when context is taken into account.

Information about human papillomavirus (HPV) disease and its vaccination has been increasingly communicated and discussed on social media platforms. The current study aims to investigate the coverage of HPV-related information on one of the most popular Chinese social media – Zhihu. Data for this study were user-generated articles, which were identified and collected by a Python web crawler with keyword searching. The final sample included a total of 115 articles, covering a two-year period between 2017 and 2018. Each article was coded for several key characteristics, including HPV epidemiological information, health belief model (HBM) constructs, framing strategy, and responses to the article. Results suggested that most of the articles reported HPV’s relationship to cervical cancer, HPV severity, and vaccination benefits. Thematic framing was more often used by the Zhihu articles to disseminate HPV-related issues, and a significant relationship between framing strategy and information coverage was found. The study has not only theoretically extended the literature of online HPV vaccine information coverage, but also practically suggested the needs to communicate comprehensive and detailed knowledge about HPV vaccination on Chinese social media.

Some of the most attractive economies are located in emerging markets. In this sense, China is one of the most attractive markets in the world. The Web, especially social media, is a platform that can be used to penetrate these markets. Yet, many local and multinational enterprises, particularly the latter, know little about the relationship between Chinese social media and Chinese digital consumers. In this paper the unique Chinese social media landscape is introduced, and the profiles of Chinese digital customers are presented with the aim of informing enterprises about the key features of Chinese social media strategies. In addition, the predominant use of Chinese social media marketing is elucidated and analyzed based on several case studies. We then highlight the challenges for both local and multinational corporations when they are involved in Chinese social media marketing. We discuss current trends in Chinese social media, including cross-platform cooperation and integrated social media, group buying, and mobile social media. Finally, we offer recommendations for companies that wish to successfully engage with Chinese consumers through social media.

Who endorses conspiracy theories? A moderated mediation model of Chinese and international social media use, media skepticism, need for cognition, and COVID-19 conspiracy theory endorsement in China

With the mobile Internet development, e-health has become increasingly connected with people's daily life. However, health information on Internet is severely corrupted by misinformation, especially for the aged. It is necessary to analyze the characteristics of health-related misinformation on Internet and to design automated detection tools. In this study, we focus on analyzing common characteristics of reliable and unreliable health-related information on Chinese online social media, and exploring possible detection method using machine learning algorithms. We first collect a dataset containing both reliable and unreliable health-related articles from multiple Chinese online social media sites, with 2,296 reliable and 2,085 unreliable included. Then we analyze their differences with respect to writing style, text topic and feature distribution by both intuitive and statistical analysis. We also manually select 104 linguistic and statistical features that are useful for machine learning classifiers. Lastly, we propose a Health-related Misinformation Detection framework (HMD) that includes a feature-based method and a text-based method for detecting unreliable health-related information. Experiments verifies the performance of our proposed HMD method.

The relationship of sex and race to attitudes toward interracial marriage has been studied by Martelle (1970) and Vandewiele (1980). Their resulcs indicated that black subjects were more favorable than white ones toward interracial marriage, and men more than women. The Interracial Marriage Attitude Scale, devised by the first author, was a sevenpoint semantic differential scale consisting of 10 items, with responses ranging from 1 (totally unacceptable) to 7 (totally acceptable). It was used to measure attitudes toward the marriage of a ( 1 ) white male--Asian female, ( 2 ) Asian male-white female, ( 3 ) white male-Hispanic female, ( 4 ) Hispanic male-white female, ( 5 ) white malePolynesian female, (6) Polynesian m a l e w h i t e female, ( 7 ) white male-Iranian female. (8) Iranian male-white female, ( 9 ) white m a l e b l a c k female, (10 ) black m a l e w h i t e female. The Tolerance and Sociability Scales of the California Psychological Inventory were also given. Inventories were administered to 120 subjects, between the ages of 18 and 23 yr., from classes at a southern university to find out if tolerance. sociabiliry, sex, and race had any significant relation to attitudes toward interracial marriage. Following attrition, 31 white subjects ( 7 men, 24 women), 22 black subjects ( 2 men, 20 women), 43 Asians (25 men, 18 women), and 15 Hispanics ( 9 men, 6 women) participated. Using a downward, step-wise multiple regression procedure,' Tolerance scores alone appeared to give the best prediction of attitudes toward interracial marriage. The higher the scores, the more liberal the attitude toward interracial mariage. Significant ( p < .05) were attitudes of subjects toward marriages of white persons and Iranians and of white and black persons. Interracial Marriage Attitudes Scores seemed to indicate that white persons' intermarriage wirh black persons or Iranians still is not approved, perhaps related to current political issues and the geographical region from which the subjects were drawn. Before further research is undertaken, validation of the Interrac~d Marriage Attitude Scale and replication of this study are needed. The scale might be expanded to allow more detailed information in assessing the bases for subjects' attitudes. Additional studies should also seek equal representation of men and women.

Dermatology misinformation on the Chinese social media platform known as RedNote/Xiaohongshu.