What is it about?
When a museum crisis spreads across social media, people may expect very different responses from the institution. We analyzed 64,349 public comments on Douyin, Bilibili, and Rednote about the Nanjing Museum donated-artifact controversy. Some comments called for investigation and consequences. Others asked for evidence and explanation or focused on restitution and public trust, including relationships with donors. We describe this pattern as distributed accountability. Douyin showed a stronger punitive profile, and Bilibili showed a stronger knowledge-based profile. Each platform still contained multiple types of public demand. The study shows how the same institutional crisis can generate distinct accountability patterns across social media environments.
Featured Image
Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Public reactions to institutional crises are often summarized through sentiment, reputation, or the volume of online discussion. Our findings show a more structured form of public judgment. Different groups of comments demand different kinds of institutional response, and their relative prominence varies across social media platforms. Douyin showed a stronger concentration of calls for investigation and consequences. Bilibili showed a stronger concentration of evidence- and explanation-oriented discussion. These cross-platform patterns remained stable across alternative coding specifications. The concept of distributed accountability provides a practical framework for identifying what publics expect institutions to explain, investigate, repair, or change. It can help museums and other trust-dependent institutions design crisis responses around the type of accountability demand they face.
Perspectives
I wanted this study to treat online reactions as structured public demands with different implications for institutional response. The Nanjing Museum controversy provided an opportunity to examine those demands across three major social media environments within the same crisis. For me, the most useful contribution is the idea of distributed accountability. It gives researchers and institutions a way to identify what kind of response the public is asking for at a given moment. I hope the framework will be tested in other museum controversies and in other trust-dependent institutions where public confidence matters.
Wei Li
City University of Macau
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cross-platform public judgment in a cultural heritage crisis: A topic modeling study of the Nanjing Museum donated-artifact controversy, PLOS One, October 2026, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360658.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
