ABSTRACT
As of December 13, 2020, the global spread of COVID-19 surpassed 72 M infected cases. Citizens took to social media to provide and seek information regarding COVID-19, raising concerns over health misinformation and source credibility. Our work focuses on the Chinese public’s navigation of information credibility in the heavily surveilled Chinese digital media system. This case study carefully spotlights the tensions in the early stages of the pandemic (Feb/March 2020) on the Chinese media platform, Bilibili. We find that Chinese state narratives through mainstream media were countered using rhetorical strategies based on coded language, carnival, and parodic satire. Although taking place in a particular temporal and geographic context, we argue that the findings generalize to digital civic resistance in any context of systemic oppression to free speech. This work also contributes to the intersection of platform governance and parodic resistance against algorithmic content moderation. We conclude with a call to media scholars to account for emerging media platforms and features to resist state media censorship and narrative dominance, particularly as a path to uplifting and amplifying the voices and stories of marginalized communities.
