Chinese Social Media Users’ Repertoires in Circumventing the Authoritarian State

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yuan Zeng, whose interest is in the tactical uses of social media and their platform affordances by young people in China. This is especially against the backdrop of the ‘zero-COVID’ lockdown in China in 2022.

Young people use digital media on a daily basis to make sense of public issues; especially so during the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, this takes place within a digital authoritarian context that places individual user agency in relation to platform providers and the authoritarian state; this affects their digital media repertoire, their engagement with platform affordances, and their communication across platforms.

Digital media repertoires reflect users’ media choices as they tactically combine various media options into a comprehensive pattern of media exposure; this emphasises their individual agency in making these choices, and in a digital context the repertoire is composed not only of media options, but also of platform and affordance choices. Platform architectures provide such affordances, and users further adapt these perceived affordances to their own needs, again exercising their own agency.

This project coded its data for this use of platform affordances, with a particular focus also on subversive and circumventive practices. It found evidence for the use of key affordances identified by Crystal Abidin: ephemerality, discoverability, and silosociality, which enabled strategic (in)visibility, platform-switching, and affective homogeneality.