Impact of ByteDance crisis communication strategies on different social media users

On July 30, 2020, the US President Donald Trump announced his plan to use executive orders or emergency economic powers to ban TikTok and disagreed with Microsoft’s acquisition of TikTok in the US. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, subsequently conducted several Chinese crisis communications on Toutiao — a platform owned by ByteDance that provides information to Chinese people. However, these announcements were reposted, sometimes rephrased or reformatted by third-party users on other Chinese social media platforms. These third-party users included both well-known influencers and general users. For example, the discussions became more salient on Sina Weibo, China’s largest online social media platform, than on any other platform, including Toutiao. Therefore, comparing crisis communications across different social media platforms is necessary. 50,702 data points were obtained for the entire dataset. Considering the efficiency of the manually labeled data, 8,793 data points were obtained after stratified random sampling of the dataset.