Who owns the South China Sea online?

Between 25 September and 25 October 2026, we collected about 23,000 social media posts on the South China Sea, written in Chinese, English, Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesian, Malay and a dozen other languages. Together they drew 11.5 million interactions.

Most of the posts came from the Philippines and its neighbours. Most of the attention went to Beijing. Fewer than 400 posts from Chinese state and state-affiliated media collected 38% of every like, share and comment in the dataset.

Counted by posts, the South China Sea online is a Philippine argument. Counted by attention, it is a Chinese broadcast. The six patterns below show how that gap formed, and what each party to the dispute does with the space it holds.

1. Beijing’s official outlets hold the attention; everyone else supplies the volume

Chinese-language posts made up 21% of the conversation and drew 53% of its interactions. English, much of it from Philippine outlets and users, ran the other way: 48% of posts, 26% of interactions. Filipino-language posts sat at 18% and 12%.

Inside the Chinese share, the weight rests on a short list of accounts: national state newspapers and broadcasters, the official news accounts of the military and the defence ministry, and provincial state media. Together they wrote 1.6% of all posts and drew 38% of all interactions. Their posts averaged about 11,900 interactions each; every other account averaged about 316. Seven of the ten most-engaged accounts in the dataset are Chinese state outlets.

The concentration runs through the whole conversation. The top 1% of posts drew 63% of all interactions. A party that wants its version of an incident to travel needs a few posts that land, and Beijing’s media system is built to produce exactly those.

2. Beijing’s announcements set the month’s rhythm, with one exception

The biggest days of the month follow statements from the PLA’s Southern Theater Command, the China Coast Guard or the Ministry of National Defense. Each statement was carried the same day by 10 to 34 separate state accounts.

On 27 September, the PLA held joint sea and air drills around Scarborough Shoal; state outlets drew 70% of that day’s interactions. On 5 October, the PLA warned a Philippine aircraft away from the shoal’s airspace; the figure was 75%. On 20 October, the USS Charleston sailed near Sabina Shoal and the Southern Theater Command said it had tracked and warned the ship off. That was the busiest day of the month, with nearly 2 million interactions, 79% of them on state posts. A single state-media clip of the incident drew 627,619 interactions, more than all posts combined on any other day of the month bar two.

The exception came on 2 October, the day after Taiwan’s coast guard turned its water cannon on a Chinese fishing boat near Pratas. It was the third-busiest day of the month, and Chinese state media contributed almost none of its interactions (more in section 6).

The days after 20 October show the other half of the pattern. Posting peaked between 19 and 22 October, when 23% of the month’s posts appeared, yet interactions fell back within a day. The volume in those days came from the Philippines, where the argument had moved somewhere else (section 4).

3. The same shoal tells a different story in each language

The two incidents of 20 and 21 October were described in two incompatible ways, and the split ran along language lines.

At Sabina Shoal, 63% of Chinese-language posts about the USS Charleston described it as an intrusion: the ship had “broken into” Chinese waters near what Beijing calls Xianbin Reef and was “expelled”. English-language posts divided almost evenly. 49% used the language of intrusion, often while reporting Beijing’s statement, and 41% described a lawful transit inside the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

At Second Thomas Shoal, the Philippines ran a routine resupply to the BRP Sierra Madre, the grounded ship its marines have occupied since 1999. The China Coast Guard announced that the mission had gone ahead “经中方允许” (with China’s permission) and under its supervision throughout. 22% of Chinese-language posts about the shoal repeated that framing. In English the figure was 4%, and in Filipino 7%.

Beijing turned a Philippine operation into a favour it had granted. Inside the Chinese-language space, that version circulated widely. Outside it, the claim barely registered. Its most-engaged Filipino-language posts quote the Philippine Coast Guard and President Marcos rejecting it; its most-engaged English posts come from Chinese state media and pro-Beijing pages repeating it with “exclusive footage”. Each audience came away from the same morning with a different account of who controls the shoal.

4. In the Philippines, the argument turned inward

In the second half of October, Filipino and Philippine-English posts moved away from what China was doing at sea and towards what Filipinos were saying about each other.

The trigger was Beijing’s ambassador in Manila, Jing Quan, who said China could easily win if it chose to use force. Philippine politicians called for him to be declared persona non grata, and the Chinese embassy replied that more Philippine officials would be barred from China if he were. Posts about the ambassador and his embassy rose from 475 in the first three weeks of the window to 2,181 from 15 October onwards.

The argument then folded into Philippine politics. One in nine posts in the dataset (11%) carries the claim that pro-China politicians and “traitors” are selling out the West Philippine Sea, and it peaked between 20 and 22 October. Its targets include Vice President Sara Duterte and her camp: Zambales fishermen telling her the country is “not for sale”, a former senator alleging that former President Duterte once ordered the navy not to patrol, and a senator asking whether officials and trolls are emboldening Beijing.

The counter-claim is smaller and lands harder. Posts arguing that Marcos’s confrontation with China is the real danger, or that corruption at home matters more than the sea, are only 1% of the dataset. They average 613 interactions each, against 371 for posts defending the Philippine position. The single most-engaged Philippine post of the month was a retired general asking why some are tough on China but not on corruption (48,715 interactions).

A third strand watches for the bill. A report that Beijing was weighing ten countermeasures against Manila, from sanctions on politicians to cuts in fertiliser and oil supplies, was credited to a Manila-based Chinese-language newspaper with ties to Chinese state media. Picked up by Philippine outlets, it reached 2% of posts at 780 interactions each.

5. Vietnam’s dispute is a slogan carried by youth culture

Vietnamese posts are a small part of the conversation, 5% of posts and 4% of interactions, but they average 418 interactions each, more than English (270) or Filipino (331) posts.

They run on a single line: “Hoàng Sa, Trường Sa là của Việt Nam”, the Paracels and the Spratlys belong to Vietnam. It appears in 21% of Vietnamese posts, often repeated word for word by different accounts. 19% carry trend and discovery hashtags, the tags used to reach younger feeds. The slogan travels beside entertainment content, history lessons and calls to boycott anything that shows China’s nine-dash “cow-tongue” line: one post with 12,206 interactions tells readers it is better to leave an idol than to leave the country.

Some Vietnamese posts look inland rather than out to sea. 4% describe China closing a ring around Vietnam through an airfield in Laos and the Ream naval base in Cambodia, about as many as name the nine-dash line itself (6%). Only 11% mention the Philippines. Vietnam’s online conversation sits apart from Manila’s, with its own vocabulary and its own map of the threat.

6. Taiwan’s water cannon was the most shared story Beijing did not tell

On 1 October, a Taiwanese coast guard ship turned its water cannon on a Chinese fishing boat that had entered restricted waters around Pratas, a marine national park Taiwan administers. The story appears in 4.6% of posts and drew 9.9% of interactions, about 1,090 per post.

Its reach came from outside the Chinese-language space. English posts drew 56% of the story’s interactions, Indonesian and Malay posts 18%, Japanese posts 5%. A single Singapore-based news broadcaster posted it twice, and those two posts drew 476,945 interactions between them, more than any other non-Chinese posts in the dataset. Indonesian news sites carried it widely. Philippine pages took it as a lesson, captioning the clips “this is what should be done with China”.

Its most-engaged Chinese-language posts, 18% of the interactions, called it an attack on mainland fishermen or mocked Taiwan’s coast guard as no match for the mainland’s. That version stayed inside its own language. The image that travelled was a role reversal: a water cannon, the tool usually filmed in Chinese hands against Philippine boats, pointed at a Chinese vessel.

Two measures, two winners

Count posts, and October looks like a month the Philippines won online: its people and outlets wrote most of what was said, defended their claim in two languages and argued about it loudly at home. Weigh attention, and the month belongs to Beijing, which drew more interactions with a few hundred clips than more than 4,000 Filipino-language posts drew combined.

The two measures also point at different weak spots. Beijing’s version of events rarely crossed out of Chinese, and the one story that crossed every language barrier, Taiwan’s water cannon, was a story it did not write. Manila’s message spread widely and thinly, and in late October much of its energy went into an argument with itself. Vietnam ran its own campaign in its own vocabulary, largely unconnected to either.

The next incident at Scarborough or Second Thomas will be fought on both measures at once, in every language at the same time, and within hours.

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About the data

We analysed 22,971 posts with text that discuss the South China Sea, its features or the parties’ coast guards and officials, published between 25 September and 25 October 2026 (UTC). Interactions are the sum of shares, likes, comments, quotes and reactions. Language was detected automatically from each post’s text, and translations are machine-generated. Chinese state and state-affiliated media means national and provincial state outlets, PLA and ministry accounts and official spokespeople, identified by account name; Hong Kong commercial broadcasters are excluded. Narratives and frames were coded with keyword rules written in each language, and a post can carry several, so shares do not add up to 100%. Near-identical reposts were counted, since each one spreads the message further. This analysis describes what was said and what drew attention; it makes no finding on automation or coordination.