Discursive practices of blame during the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese Weibo

The participatory affordance of web platforms has encouraged ordinary users’ participation in sociopolitical issues and opened up new channels for public opinion expression, particularly to blame authorities for their perceived wrongdoings. The current critical discourse analysis study contributes to this scholarship by investigating bottom-up discursive practices on user-generated texts on Weibo, the most widely used social media website in China. Using Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, we examine how netizens blame the elite group for their money and mask donations during the COVID-19 pandemic. They do this by constructing an identity for the elites as norm-breaching, outliers, and criminals, in contrast to their own norm-monitoring and judicial identity, thereby justifying the blame on the elites. Several discursive practices were identified with varying degrees of rationality and affectivity. Data includes comments presented in both textual and image forms.