COVID-19 Vaccines on TikTok: A Big-Data Analysis of Entangled Discourses

Shaojing Sun, Zhiyuan Liu, Yujia Zhai () and Fan Wang ()
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Shaojing Sun: Institute for Global Communications & Integrated Media, School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Zhiyuan Liu: Institute for Global Communications & Integrated Media, School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
Yujia Zhai: Management School, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300387, China
Fan Wang: Fudan Development Institute (FDDI), Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 20, 1-15

Abstract: Focusing on social media affordances and China’s social/political context, the present study analyzed the digital communication practices about COVID-19 vaccines on a popular social media platform—TikTok—which is called DouYin in China. Overall, this study identified five major forces partaking in constructing the discourses, with government agencies and state media being the dominant contributors. Furthermore, video posters demonstrated different patterns of utilizing social media affordances (e.g., hashtags) in disseminating their messages. The top hashtags adopted by state media were more representative of international relations and Taiwan; those by government agencies were of updates on pandemic outbreaks; those by individual accounts were of mainstream values and health education; those by commercial media were of celebrities and health education; those by enterprise accounts were of TikTok built-in marketing hashtags. The posted videos elicited both cognitive and affective feedback from online viewers. Implications of the findings were discussed in the context of health communication and global recovery against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and Chinese culture.

Keywords: social media; vaccine; TikTok; health communication; big data; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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