In January 2020, Guo Jing’s diary from quarantined Wuhan made it to BBC News’ Twitter feeds (Figure 4.1). A social worker newly settled in the city; Jing narrated the first COVID-19 lockdown by sharing fragments of her lonely life. She wrote about her fears of life and death, often hinting at dysfunctions in the Chinese authorities’ handling of the pandemic outbreak (BBC News, 2020a).

The first journal entries were published on a WeChat public account but Jing herself described the challenges she had to face when trying to live report the pandemic on Chinese social media:

The diary made it to BBC News, and to Twitter, because of the news value of its human – and humane – essence, an essence that, back then, sounded extremely ‘exotic’ to Western audiences. This ‘exoticness’, we now know, would not last very long.

We take Guo Jing’s story as a starting point to reflect on COVID-19, humans, and digital platforms, because it sheds light on the way these three entities differently intertwined in China and in the West at the start of the pandemic. We reflect on how platforms, in their context of use and with their specific affordances, shaped the way COVID-19 came to be known, understood and, ultimately, lived in China and in the West.

When we think of the functions, uses and values of social media platforms, we are often tempted to think of a universal ‘digital society’, primarily drawing on Western or Global North contexts and models (Chan, 2013). And yet, by picturing features of social media as somehow intrinsic in technology, we neglect to account for the way in which broader environments and contexts shape platform uses in everyday life (Willems, 2020).