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When the COVID-19 virus broke out in China, foreign observers speculated whether the Chinese leadership was facing its ‘Chernobyl Moment’. China’s leadership, however, defied foreign expectations about its ostensibly floundering legitimacy and instead turned the crisis into a national success story. This article explores the role that digital media played in cementing this success, specifically how various actors mobilized nationalist sentiments and discourses on the online video-sharing platform Bilibili. By focusing on visual discourses, online commentaries, and the affordances of the digital platform, the article analyses the role that ‘hip’ and youthful content played in the authorities’ attempts to guiding online audiences to rally around the flag. The results of these efforts were viral villages of community sentiment that created strong incentives for conformity, and in which the official party line was able to reverberate with pop-culture memes and popular nationalism.

Nationalism today interacts in complicated ways with advanced information and communication systems, regularly leading to unanticipated consequences. Popular online nationalism in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a case in point: In the PRC, digital nationalism has become a central feature of political discourse and decision-making, at times powerfully shaping the state's policy efforts. This article explores a missing puzzle piece in how state-led and popular nationalism interact in Chinese politics: the role that advanced information and communication technologies play in such processes. This is a question that is not only relevant to scholars of China but also to anyone interested in the role that digital media and communication play in the formation and spread of contemporary nationalism. How do interactions in complex sociotechnical systems affect nationalism today? To answer this question, the article analyses and traces interaction and feedback loops in Chinese digital environments during Sino-Japanese disputes over the East China Sea. It shows how the interactions between humans, organisations and technologies create unexpected variations in outcome that resonate through China's internet and create the conditions from which digital nationalism can powerfully emerge to shape legitimation and policy-making processes.

This article examines the ways in which experiences of homeland take shape through the use of social media among first- and second-generation Kurdish migrants living in Milan and surrounding areas in the Lombardy region of Italy. Drawing on a short-term ethnographic study of social media practices carried out in spring and summer 2018, the paper presents and compares the uses of social media among two migrant generations and conceptualizes homeland as a mediated experience that takes shape through people’s everyday social media practices. This approach to homeland can account for the multiple ways in which the affordances of digital platforms and the subjective aspects of homeland are interconnected with one another through social media practices. The paper is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

The affordances of social media technologies increasingly allow Olympians to directly communicate with global audiences. Olympians can thus become more powerful autonomous discursive actors, threatening traditional Olympic power dynamics that have protected lucrative Olympic media streams. And yet, Olympians have yet to use social media technology to fully exercise their autonomy. This article adopts a social construction of technology lens within a larger critical discourse analysis framework to analyze the reticent behavior of social media–enabled Olympians. It is suggested that their social media voices are constrained by a powerful set of obligations to their nation-state. These obligations can be understood as ritualistic deep play national proxy identifications, which are constructed and reinforced by Olympic policies and practices, as well as larger sociocultural contextual factors. This argument is explicated through an analysis of Olympics policy documents and case studies from the first two Olympiads, where social media had a major impact: the London 2012 Games and the Sochi 2014 Winter Games.