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Abstract
Negotiating reading positions in news comments on social media is closely related to the commenter-news-reader relationship. This research paper uses Goffman’s footing framework to analyze evaluative readings on Chinese social media to understand the structural roles of news readers in producing comments across the news-reader relations and the reader-reader relations. Following the coverage of a Mercedes car quality issue in People’s Daily and Global Times, 205 comments were collected from the Weibo website. The analysis reveals six distinct patterns of author-animator and principal relationships: naturalized footing, borrowing footing from well-known sayings, interactive footing with co-constructed positions, collective footing, embedding footing in others’ evaluations and splitting footing with two-part incumbents. These strategies enable commenters to establish their positions, express opinions, signal membership and navigate censorship in the context of challenging sociopolitical issues. The findings are appliable for future work of this kind in other languages, depending on the context and culture of interaction.
Published Version
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