The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Lingyan Ma, whose interest is in self-censorship. Visibility on social media for Douyin content creators in China is both reward and risk: visibility provides legitimacy and creates labour and income opportunities, but this also comes with safety risks which are managed by self-censorship.
Creators translate layered constraints into routine production decisions and identity work; this is done through various strategies. These respond to governance cues, engage in interpretive learning and adaptive performance, and thereby produce and present a platform-compatible self. Visibility incentives create feedback loops for this process.
This paper explored these processes through 27 interviews with Douyin producers in China, covering various areas of interest and activity from everyday life to fashion and beauty influencers. They highlighted their comment sections as early-warning systems for potentially problematic areas, and also noted that audiences can become governance agents through their reporting activities.
They also respond to patterns in their metrics, which may be indicators of shadowbanning or other forms of content censorship by platforms and the government; this leads to strategies for inferring the sensitivity of specific concepts, and deletion or avoidance of certain topics. There are also considerations of the implications of activities for workplace, family, and local networks, and overall reputational and institutional risks.
Pre-editing content, substituting themes, recoding language, and withdrawing constant are all mechanisms for self-censorship; this also includes the use of euphemisms for sensitive topics such as the police or money. But such strategies also result in identity conflicts, frustration, burnout, and a narrowing of topics, language, and content until they become more indirect and even illegible.
The question here is therefore not so much what content was removed through post factum censorship, but what was produced in the first place, and under what conditions of a priori self-censorship.
