Platformed banal nationalism: algorithmic curation, one-click patriotism and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics on Weibo

Existing research on digital nationalism has largely focused on overt, high-emotion expressions such as online confrontations or state-orchestrated campaigns. This study shifts attention to the mundane, low-intensity interactions that reproduce national belonging in everyday platform use. Proposing the concept of "platformed banal nationalism", the study examines how social media infrastructure shapes the daily circulation of national symbols. This study draws on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 18 Chinese adults who followed the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics coverage on the People's Daily Weibo account. It finds that national identity is reproduced not primarily through explicit ideological mobilisation but through habitual platform practices, including scrolling, liking, one-click reposting, and standardised commenting. Three mechanisms are identified as central to this process. Algorithmic visibility enables trending lists and newsfeed ranking to systematically amplify state-endorsed narratives. Interactional frictionlessness reduces patriotic expression to a single click and encourages automated forms of participation. Institutional privilege grants state-affiliated accounts greater visibility through verification badges, algorithmic weighting, and agenda-setting authority. The study also discusses the boundary conditions of these mechanisms as a most-likely case of high symbolic density. By revealing the interplay between platform architecture and user habits, this research extends banal nationalism to the digital environment and provides micro-empirical evidence for understanding the platformisation of political communication.

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