Social Support and Connective Affordances: Examining Responses to Early Covid-19 Patient Support Seeking on Microblogs

Focusing on the new Super-Topics Platform (STP) of Weibo, this study examined microblog users’ responses to the support seeking of early Covid-19 patients suffering the first outbreak in China. A total of 853 patients’ support-seeking messages, along with 81,000 comments to 270 patients’ help-requests, were crawled and analyzed. Results showed that content characteristics influenced endorsing, sharing, and commenting by users. Furthermore, the study identified three types of social support present in Weibo viewers’ comments: emotional, informational, and diffusional supports. These social support types were inherently linked to the connective affordances, which are more inclusive than paralinguistic digital affordances, of microblogs.