#FleeingWuhan: Legitimation and Delegitimation Strategies in Hostile Online Discourse

Oxford University Press. Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, UK. Tel: +44-1865-353907; Fax: +44-1865-353485; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/

Y

29

Foreign Countries; Pandemics; COVID-19; Social Media; Electronic Publishing; Web Sites; Discourse Analysis; Crisis Management; Relocation; Health Promotion; Psychological Patterns; Computer Mediated Communication; Attitudes; Ethics

10.1093/applin/amac061

0142-6001
1477-450X

Following the first coronavirus case reported to the World Health Organization in Wuhan in 2019 and the ensuing city-wide lockdown that was imposed, many people attempted to leave the city, culminating in a vigorous discourse on the dominant Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. This study seeks to examine how online participants discursively delegitimated and legitimated people who left Wuhan before the lockdown. Weibo posts with the hashtag #[characters omitted] ('Fleeing Wuhan') were collected, and delegitimation and legitimation strategies deployed by users were identified. My findings reveal that the delegitimators exploited moral evaluation and impersonal authority to highlight the construed unethicality and shamelessness of people who left Wuhan, whereas the legitimators used an array of strategies, including explanation and definition, to normalize their intentions and counter linguistic hostility. These findings also provide implications vis-à-vis the clustering of delegitimation strategies as well as their linkages with emotional appeals in online discourse.

As Provided

2023

EJ1384004