Burning Barriers: Coordinated Twitter Activity during China’s COVID-19 Protests

Social media have become crucial for citizens in non-democratic societies to voice their dissent and dissatisfaction with the government’s policies and leaders (Weidmann & Rød, 2019). At the same time, they have been used to raise the costs of activism and repress digital activists and movements (Earl et al., 2022). Research has demonstrated that coordinated behavior on social media, an orchestrated publication or sharing of content by multiple actors within a confined timeframe to increase their influence (Giglietto et al., 2020), serves as a viable approach for both online activists and government digital forces to amplify their voices and expand the reach of their narratives (King et al., 2017; Keller, 2020; Kulichkina et al., 2023). In this study, we apply Toepfl’s (2020) theoretical framework of authoritarian publics to examine Twitter as an environment that accommodates leadership-critical, policy-critical, and uncritical publics at the same time. In an authoritarian country like the People’s Republic of China, the autonomy of the online sphere is diminished via the Great Firewall, and local social media platforms restrict public deliberation (Creemers, 2017). Unlike local services, Twitter provides greater opportunities for protest mobilization and internationalization, especially in times of crisis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese citizens used virtual private networks to seek out crisis-related information across the Great Firewall, which exposed them to unrelated and regime-damaging information (Chang et al., 2022). Notably, Twitter played an important role in China’s 2022 COVID-19 protests. It is known that Twitter serves as a venue of digital public spheres where local and nonlocal forms of communication coexist (Pfetsch et al., 2021). Therefore, we use language as an indicator to distinguish between critical publics operating within, close to, or far from the sphere of authoritarian influence and identify discursive practices strategically used by and for users of simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and English. We investigate the content published in these languages by coordinated networks, the extent of coordinated action, and the temporal distribution of coordinated posts aimed at protest or repression during China’s 2022 COVID-19 protests. We collected over 12 million relevant tweets via Twitter API v2 for academic research during the protest days using protest-related keywords in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and English and conducted coordination detection using CooRTweet (Righetti & Balluff, 2023) and biterm topic modeling using BTM (Yan et al., 2013). Our findings indicate that 14.48% of all tweets were amplified through coordination, particularly in simplified Chinese and English. The themes discussed varied among languages. While tweets amplifying the protests were more prominent in each language, English tweets featured a noticeable presence of adult content and spam, followed by simplified Chinese tweets. This tactic aimed at distracting the audience aligns with prior research on digital repression in authoritarian contexts (e.g., King et al., 2017) but is primarily directed at the global English-speaking audience. Our study highlights the importance of incorporating opposing publics and discursive practices into the framework of authoritarian publics. The findings also provide insights into the evolving strategies for coordinating and internationalizing digital protest and repression.