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Following a burgeoning literature on private actors under digital authoritarianism, this study aims to understand the role played by social media users in sustaining authoritarian rule. It examines a subcultural community—the queer-fantasy community—on Chinese social media to expound how members of this community interpreted China's censorship policy, interacted based on the interpretation, and participated in censorship. Integrating structural topic modeling and emergent coding, this study finds that a political environment of uncertainty fostered divergent imaginaries about censorship. These imaginaries encouraged participatory censorship within the online community, which strengthened the political control of the Internet in the absence of the state. This study illuminates how participatory censorship works, especially in non-professional and non-politically mobilized online communities. With a focus on social media users, it also offers a lens for future research to compare peer-based surveillance and content moderation in authoritarian and democratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The divides between social groups in American society today extend from political opinion to lifestyle and emotions. A less explored area, however, is how these divides relate to potential divides in morality. The Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere prioritizes deliberative reasoning as a way to solve moral conflicts. In contrast, this study argues that divides in reasoning and opinion are associated with divides in morality. To make the argument, this study focuses on the case of public debates over whether social media companies should deplatform Trump and his supporters in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Public comments were obtained from a dataset compiled and released by Facebook Oversight Board. First, I used structural topic modeling to identify the reasoning and used the dictionary based on the Moral Foundations Theory to gauge moral foundations in each document. Then, I used statistical analysis to examine whether there was a correlation between specific reasoning and moral foundations. The results show that the pro- and anti-deplatforming camps in the debate are divided not only in reasoning, but also in morality. Supporters of deplatforming argue that it would fulfill tech companies' public responsibility, and protect society at large. These arguments are correlated with the care foundation. In contrast, opponents argue that deplatforming Trump violated freedom of speech. This argument is correlated with the fairness, loyalty, and authority foundations, but not the care foundation. The findings support my argument that divides in reasoning should be analyzed with consideration of morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of health misinformation on social media could significantly influence individuals' health behaviors. To examine the prevalent topics, propagation, and correction of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) misinformation, automated content analyses were conducted for posts on Sina Weibo, which is China's largest microblogging site. In total, 177,816 posts related to COVID-19 misinformation during the COVID-19 outbreak in China were analyzed. The structural topic modeling identified 23 valid topics regarding COVID-19 misinformation and its correction, which were further categorized into three general themes. Sentiment analysis was conducted to generate positive and negative sentiment scores for each post. The zero-inflated Poisson model indicated that only the negative sentiment was a significant predictor of the number of comments (β = 0.003, p < 0.001) but not reposts. Furthermore, users are more prone to repost and comment on information regarding prevention/treatment (e.g., traditional Chinese medicine preventing COVID) as well as potential threats of COVID-19 (e.g., COVID-19 was defined as an epidemic by World Health Organization). Health education and promotion implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]