Comparing stress and behavioral coping strategies during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis among domestic and overseas Taiwanese.

This study reported domestic and overseas Taiwanese people's perceived stress levels and examined the mediation effect of their coping strategies during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We recruited 2727 Taiwanese respondents from the COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey (N = 173,426) between March 30 and May 30, 2020. The self-report questionnaire included a modified 10-item Perceived Stress Scale and a 16-item coping strategy scale. Three stress-coping factors were extracted with principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Their effects were examined through a regression and mediation analysis. The overseas Taiwanese participants had a significantly higher stress level than domestic counterparts (2.89 to 2.69 in 1-5 scale, p < 0.001). Government guidance was associated with lower stress level among domestic (- 0.097, 95% C.I. [- 0.131, - 0.063]) but not overseas Taiwanese (0.025, [- 0.114, 0.163]). The association of stress level with residency was mediated by coping strategies, for government guidance (0.04, [0.01, 0.07], ref: domestic participants) and supportive social networks (- 0.03, [- 0.05, - 0.01]). All results hold after the propensity score matching on samples. Government guidance on COVID-19 as a channel for coping with stress is correlated with the residency status of the respondents. Public health authorities should recognize the importance of various mental health interventions during pandemics.

Influencing overseas Chinese by tweets: text-images as the key tactic of Chinese propaganda.

The literature on China's social media foreign propaganda mostly focuses on text-format contents in English, which may miss the real target and the tool for analysis. In this article, we traced 1256 Twitter accounts echoing China government's #USAVirus propaganda before and after Twitter removed state-linked operations on June 12, 2020. The 3567 tweets with #USAVirus we collected, albeit many written in English, 74% of them attached with a lengthy simplified Chinese text-image. Distribution of the post-creation time fits the working-hour in China. Overall, 475 (37.8%) accounts we traced were later suspended after Twitter's disclosure. Our dataset enables us to analyze why and why not Twitter suspends certain accounts. We apply the decision tree, random forest, and logit regression to explain the suspensions. All models suggest that the inclusion of a text-image is the most important predictor. The importance outweighs the number of followers, engagement, and the text content of the tweet. The prevalence of simplified Chinese text-images in the #USAVirus trend and their impact on Twitter account suspensions both evidence the importance of text-image in the study of state-led propaganda. Our result suggests the necessity of extracting and analyzing the content in the attached text-image.