Passing on the “whistle”: Users’ creative engagement with platform censorship in an online relay campaign in China

Abstract

The advances and proliferation of social media technologies have not only empowered Chinese users with more opportunities for opinion expression and public participation, but also provided the censors with increasingly sophisticated means to monitor and control the public discourse. In this game of cat and mouse, Chinese censors and users are intertwined with each other as new forms of censorship and counter-censorship stimulate both sides to further develop tactics to compete with each other. Drawing on (social) media discourse analysis, this study examines the strategies users adopted in an online relay campaign to keep a censored article alive on WeChat Public Accounts. The analysis highlights three major forms of creative strategies including textual reproductions, multi-semiotic and multimodal reproductions, and technically encoded forms. It also underscores platform censorship as a particular level of censorship where the platform takes responsibility for removing sensitive or perceived sensitive posts and content. This study adds to the growing literature that examines creative strategies of censorship engagement and a more nuanced understanding of the multi-layered online censorship mechanism in China.