Framing the TikTok Ban: A Textual Analysis of Chinese and American News Discourse

This study investigates how four major news outlets from China and the United States—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Global Times, and China Daily—represent the discourse surrounding the U.S. government’s restrictions on Tik Tok. Drawing on a self-compiled corpus of 100 news articles published between January 2023 and December 2024, the research adopts a mixed-methods approach that integrates keyword-in-context analysis, sentiment analysis, text clustering, and correspondence analysis. The study aims to uncover how media from two counterpart countries’ narratives differ in tone, thematic emphasis, and lexical framing toward the same controversial issue. By comparing Chinese and American media representations of the Tik Tok ban policy, the study contributes to the growing field of digital geopolitics and computational media discourse analysis. It demonstrates how language, emotion, and thematic structure reflect broader ideological orientations, and provides a quantitative framework for examining cross-national media narratives in the context of platform regulation and technological conflict.