What makes an online help-seeking message go far during the COVID-19 crisis in mainland China? A multilevel regression analysis.

Various studies have explored the underlying mechanisms that enhance the overall reach of a support-seeking message on social media networks. However, little attention has been paid to an under-examined structural feature of help-seeking message diffusion, information diffusion depth, and how support-seeking messages can traverse vertically into social media networks to reach other users who are not directly connected to the help-seeker. Using the multilevel regression to analyze 705 help-seeking posts regarding COVID-19 on Sina Weibo, we examined sender, content, and environmental factors to investigate what makes help-seeking messages traverse deeply into social media networks. Results suggested that bandwagon cues, anger, instrumental appeal, and intermediate self-disclosure facilitate the diffusion depth of help-seeking messages. However, the effects of these factors were moderated by the epidemic severity. Implications of the findings on support-seeking behavior and narrative strategies on social media were also discussed.

Conditional transparency: Differentiated news framings of COVID-19 severity in the pre-crisis stage in China.

Transparency of Chinese media coverage became an international controversy when the COVID-19 outbreak initially emerged in Wuhan, the eventual crisis epicenter in China. Unlike studies characterizing mass media in authoritarian contexts as government mouthpieces during a crisis, this study aims to disaggregate Chinese media practices to uncover differences in when, where, and how the severity of COVID-19 was reported. We examine differences in how media institutions reported the severity of the COVID-19 epidemic in China during the pre-crisis period from 1 January 2020 to 20 January 2020 in terms of both the "vertical" or hierarchical positions of media institutions in the Chinese media ecosystem and the "horizontal" positions of media institutions' social proximity to Wuhan in terms of geographical human traffic flows. We find that the coverage of crisis severity is negatively associated with the media's social proximity to Wuhan, but the effect varies depending on the positional prominence of a news article and situation severity. Implications of the institutions' differentiated reporting strategies on future public health reporting in an authoritarian context are also discussed.