Social Media Discourses on Interracial Intimacy: Tracking Racism and Sexism through Chinese Geo-located Social Media Data

Zheng WEI, Yixuan Xie, Danyun XIAO, Simin Zhang, Pan Hui, Muzhi ZHOU

Keywords: Interracial Intimate Relationships, Social Media, Sentiment Analysis, IP Geolocation

Abstract: By analyzing the regional differences in the sentiment of comments on short video posts related to interracial intimate relationships on Douyin, a Chinese social media platform, we depict the Chinese social media discourses on four interracial relationship types (Black men and Chinese women, Black women and Chinese men, White men and Chinese women, White women and Chinese men) and explore potential regional differences in these discourses. The region information is derived from the IP geolocation, which has been publicly available since April 2022, when the Chinese government mandated social media companies to display the IP geolocation of all platform users. Our content analysis revealed that the Black men and Chinese women attracted the most negative comments and the White women and Chinese men received the least negative comments. We also observed substantial regional differences in the discourses towards these interracial relationships. We investigated several provincial socioeconomic development indicators and noted that GDP, population size, and openness to Western cultures all contribute to the negative sentiment levels. This work advances our understanding of the interplay of race, gender, and immigration in constructing public discourses on social media and offers important insights into how these discourses evolve along with socioeconomic development.

Track: Social Networks, Social Media, and Society

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Submission Number: 124