The Relevance of Compassion Fatigue in Social Media Discourse on the Russia- Ukraine Crisis

Taking Twitter and Weibo as examples

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_35How to use a DOI?

Keywords

compassion fatigue; Weibo; Twitter; digital warfare

Abstract

On 24 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the launch of a special military operation against Ukraine, accompanied by the sounding of air-raid sirens in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, and the Russia-Ukraine crisis officially broke out. This East Asian crisis has attracted global attention and sparked extensive global media coverage. This study aims to explore the relevance of sympathy fatigue in the discourse of social media regarding the Russia-Ukraine crisis. At a time when digital warfare has become one of the forms of modern warfare, how the public, as a media audience, understands and creates public opinion has become the focus of research on social media audiences. The outbreak of a war crisis is also a tragedy for humanity. Digital warfare has created a new era of compassion fatigue. A critical discourse analysis of the rhetoric of Weibo and Twitter reveals the different characteristics of the content of communication in the different social contexts of China and the West, the collision of nationalism and racism, the pursuit of peace and the spread of Confucianism. And underneath these contents, popular sympathy fatigue is weakened as well as enhanced. And reflecting on compassion fatigue itself, not only in terms of its communication effects but also in terms of understanding its own meaning, the enhancement of compassion is not necessarily the direction to be pursued, but for the strengthening of rational thinking and the supplementation of humanistic concern is the core of what needs to be worked on in the process of war news communication.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Junlin Zhan
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/30
TI  - The Relevance of Compassion Fatigue in Social Media Discourse on the Russia- Ukraine Crisis
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 298
EP  - 311
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_35
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_35
ID  - Zhan2022
ER  -