This research explores the multifaceted digital representations of ‘Beiou Feng’ (Nordic style) on WeChat public accounts, a prominent social media platform in China. Positioned at the confluence of media language, consumerism, and digital misinformation, this study unpacks how the Nordic Style’s hallmarks of minimalism, practicality, and sustainability are propagated or misrepresented through digital narratives. We found a dichotomy through semantic network visualization and sentiment analysis on a corpus composed of 319 articles from WeChat. On the one hand, a prevalent trend of commercial content oversimplifies the Nordic style to monochrome and low-budget concepts while often neglecting its authentic cultural and design intricacies. Conversely, a smaller set of constantly emerging articles seeks to confront these misrepresentations by introducing the vibrant, diverse, and human-centric features of the Nordic style. We address the findings in the context of Chinese commercial media (shangye meiti) and self-published media (zi meiti) through their distinct communication strategies and operational objectives. We suggest that two media-based practices generate the cycle of misinformation and refutation online: digital narratives that aim to influence consumer perceptions and rebuttal dialogues that aim to attract a broader online audience. This study reveals how digital narratives portray a Western cultural phenomenon on the censored Chinese Internet. It also emphasizes the impact of social media on shaping consumer opinions and international branding strategies. Furthermore, this study also signals the imperative to tackle disinformation in the digital era.

Keywords: digital misinformation, Chinese social media, consumerism, media language, corpus linguistics