Triadic Network Agenda-Setting of asylum and refugee discourses during Hong Kong's political transition

Network agenda-setting theory proposes that media transfer issue salience and structural attribute relationships to public and political agendas. However, this theory has been predominantly tested in stable democracies, leaving unclear how network-level agenda transfer functions during authoritarian transitions. This study employs a Triadic Network Agenda-Setting framework to examine how Hong Kong's transition from semi-democratic to authoritarian governance shifted agenda dynamics about asylum seekers. Analyzing asylum coverage across Hong Kong newspapers, online forums, and legislators’ Facebook pages between 2016 and 2024, the study employed structural topic modeling, multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure, and Granger causality tests to assess network-level structural alignment and attribute-level temporal dynamics. Within a corpus dominated by one pro-establishment newspaper, legislative-to-media structural alignment emerged in the authoritarian period but concentrated within that outlet rather than diffusing across the press system, while legislative temporal influence on attribute salience disappeared. This press-state alignment ran directly between legislators and the dominant outlet rather than transitively through public discourse, and engaged online publics remained structurally independent of media and legislative networks across politically heterogeneous communities. Given the outlet-selective character of press–state alignment, humanitarian counter-narratives may gain greater traction through outlets retaining structural autonomy than through direct contestation of the dominant outlet.