The phenomenon of political trust in virtual communities (based on the materials of Chinese social networks during the Covid-19 pandemic)

Abstract

Political trust is a barometer of the effectiveness of national governance, a link in the relationship between the people and the Government, and plays the role of a political stabilizer. The relevance of this topic conditioned by the fact that in the Internet era, 1 when everyone ‘holds a microphone’ on the network media in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, communication in the network virtual spaces such as Weibo and forums is capable of dissipating and restoring trust in governments in the form of questions, doubts and criticism, which has an impact on political media ecology as a whole. The paper is based on the media monitoring of the network communities in China. The author analyses the forms of manifestation of the confrontational (conflict-prone) discourse of virtual communities in the context of the pandemic of the New Corona virus and the following ‘infodemic’, and considers the ways of restoring the political trust of network virtual communities within this context, whereas: (1) the government should include the network virtual space in the sphere of national governance in order to open bidirectional channels for good communication with the masses; (2) the quality of discourse in the network space of the virtual community should be improved; (3) the network media should fulfill their social responsibilities, while ensuring the quality of the content.