Chinese Social Media

Xu, J & W, S (2015). ‘Is Sina Weibo on the way out as the most popular weiguan platform in China’, Internet Policy Observatory (IPO), http://www.global.asc.upenn.edu/is-sina-weibo-on-the-way-out-as-the-most-popular-weiguan-platform-in-china/

The Eighteenth Party Congress' Third Plenary Session's Decision maps out the country's plan for cultural and media development. There is nothing on the surface that suggests a radical departure from the tight control the Chinese party-state exerts. The Decision is full of paternalistic clichés about the development of socialist culture under the guidance of Marxism, media controls, and the unification between social benefits and economic benefits. But new elements embedded in the Decision contain potential seeds for at least a partial reordering of the dynamic tension between impulses demanding control and those calling for expression in the Chinese cultural and media realm, with control perhaps gaining ground. These elements also figure in China's recent effort to develop culture industries and rebalance domestic media control and international cultural expansion and influence. This essay does not aim to provide a comprehensive commentary on China's recent cultural policies as they relate to the Decision. Instead, it focuses on the intersection between cultural and media policies and the push and pull between the party-state and aggressive market-oriented media producers. Specifically, the essay will highlight some potential changes in the following six areas: (1) control mechanisms, (2) the prescribed nature of a media organization, (3) media censorship, (4) media consolidation and economies of scale, (5) the entry of private capital into the Chinese media industries, and (6) China's soft power and public diplomacy.

本文关注中国的民族主义，将民族主义根植于中国的历史环境中， 并探讨了官方民族主义、大众民族主义、政治民族主义和消费民族主义的相通和区别之处。本文首先回顾了中国的民族主义自鸦片战争以来的发展，希望从一个更宏观的角度理解民族主义。接着，文章研究了与民族主义所应对的普世主义（cosmopolitanism)，并指出现代中国通常在民族主义和普世主义之间摇摆。接下来，本文以帝吧出征为例分析网络民族主义的表现。 从很大的意义上说，帝吧出征不仅仅是一种网络民族主义的宣泄，更是一种在消费文化和全球地缘政治大环境下有关身份政治的表演。这种表演不仅根植于我们对历史的选择性记忆，而且也是在文化全球化的语境下对中国人、中国应有的国际地位的一种主张；是对中国在全球化过程中遇到挫折（如中国的主权和领土完整以及身份认同等）的一种应对，是国内和国际力量，政治和经济文化以及官方和民间因素的一种结合体。

MA Thesis submitted to University of Toronto Department of History, 2018.

This essay is originally part of a bigger research project, covering the Han Dress or Hanfu Movement outside of the People's Republic of China, and its impact on ethnic and national identity politics in Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Social networking sites (SNS) are online platforms that enable individuals new opportunities for the management of personal relationships and the construction of their Self online. Cultural identity can exert an influence on self-presentation and communicative behaviors within SNSs. The current study investigates identity construction processes on the Chinese SNS Renren. Based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, the study examines whether the features of the Chinese culture affect the users’ self-presentation. The paper is based on a qualitative and ethnographical investigation of 28 Renren users, between the ages of 18 and 25, living in large cities in China. My findings indicate that the identities produced in this online environment are sensitive to the national culture. The research study reveals the paradigm of a complex, plural and changing Self, deeply influenced by the traditional values of the Chinese culture but also conditioned by Western ideologies and lifestyles, as a result of the recent modernization of the country. These elements lead to a renegotiation of the traditional values, paving the way to a new conception of the Chinese Self.

A company is only as strong as its weakest customer relationship and Going Mobile: Going Social shows how companies large and small can use the mobile and social media platforms to develop and foster these relationships. Much more than a wireless transmitter optimized for voice input and output, a mobile phone, a tablet or a phablet is an always-on, anytime, anywhere marketing and sales device that follows a mobile user throughout his or her digital day. It is also an entertainment, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and social networking tool, which makes it, potentially, the most powerful device in the history of marketing and customer relationships. The mobile device is, literally, a marketing tool that can—and usually is—personalized by its owner, and is within the reach of that owner almost every hour of every single day—once again a marketer's dream.
Going Mobile: Going Social reveals how businesses of almost any type can benefit from mobile and social media technology. Social media is about more than just connecting with friends on Facebook or uploading videos to YouTube or photographs to Flickr. It is more than just making comments on a blog or firing off a tweet on a microblog. The social media world is a vast and not quite fully understood web of interconnected sites. Going Mobile: Going Social breaks down and fully explains the various forms of mobile and social media, including everything from augmented reality (AR) to Common Short Codes (CSC) to blogs to podcasts to RSS feeds to social networks to video-casting and a whole host of other technologies in-between. The author explains how and why individuals and businesses should use these platforms to get their message out as well as increase their sales. Using real-world examples, the author explains how companies are building strong customer brands through social media.
Going Mobile: Going Social also delves into the world of mobile advertising. In the not-too-distant future, digital advertising will employ a multi-screen strategy that follows its audience throughout his or her digital day. Mobile marketing and mobile advertising have the potential to transform the way marketers connect with their customers and potential customers. In this mobile advertising world, consumers will be seen as participants rather than as a “target audience.” With blogs, vlogs, social networks, message boards, and viral messaging, advertisers are now faced with a radically different marketing landscape than they were just a few short years ago. This is a new landscape, a landscape in which marketers are no longer in complete control of the message, but it is a world that must be embraced and not feared.
In the final chapter, the writer brings it all together, explaining how a specific mobile or social media solution works for eight individual industries and artistic fields. Web 2.0 changed the relationship between a company and its consumers forever. Web 3.0 has gone even further; in shifting the power away from the corporation and into the hands of the consumer, Web 3.0 has empowered the consumer with a voice unheard of in the history of advertising. The voice of the online consumer is now part of the message and consumers are fully vested participants in the conversation; this fact shouldn’t frighten business executives, it should actually excite them. The revolution has begun and it will be mobilized, localized, socialized and personalized.

The Predictive Casino is a casino that utilizes the latest technological developments to connect with its customers to deliver an exceptional personalized experience to each and every one of its patrons. Today, technology such as AI, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, IoT, Real-time stream processing, social media, and wearables are altering the Customer Experience (CX) landscape and casino operators need to jump aboard this fast moving technology or run the risk of being left out in the cold.
The Predictive Casino reveals how these and other technologies can help shape the customer journey. The book details how the five types of analytics—descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and edge analytics—affect not only the customer journey, but also just about every operating function of the casino.
Facial recognition technology can spot a customer stepping onto a casino bus at the Macau/China border and that set off alerts that can notify a host on the floor, a restaurant manager, a dealer, or even the hotel’s GM should the player be a high-end VIP. A whole other sequence of events gets triggered as the player’s favorite table is prepared, his favorite, and his or her Theo gets added to a real-time table games revenue management model that takes into account his personal play. Labor needs are also considered and alerts can be sent to the required or unneeded staff.
An IoT connected casino can make its operations smart. Connected devices can help with inventory optimization, supply chain management, labor management, waste management, as well as keep its data centers green and its energy use smart. 
Social media is no longer a vanity platform, but rather a place to both connect with current customers as well as court new ones. It is also a powerful branding channel that can be utilized to both understand a casino's position in the market, as well as a place to benchmark its position against its competitors.
Today, technology moves at break-neck speed and it can offer the potential of anticipatory capabilities, but it also comes with a confusing variety of technology and technological terms--Big Data, Cognitive Computing, CX, Data Lakes, Hadoop, Kafka, Personalization, Spark, etc., etc. The Predictive Casino will help make sense of it all, so that a casino executive can cut through the confusing technological jargon and understand why a Spark-based real-time stream processing data stream might be preferable over a TIBCO one, or an IBM one. This book will help casino executives break through the technological clutter so that they can deliver an unrivaled customer experience to each and every patron coming through their doors.

This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane 'heart-warming' moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and 'the West', especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the 'correct collective memory' of a nationalized tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterized by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and 'the West', which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativizations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.

The Mandarin Chinese term biaoqing, or ‘expression’, categorizes genres of visual content ranging from emoticons and emoji to stickers and custom images. This article is grounded on ethnographic research and approaches biaoqing in terms of their circulation across Chinese digital media platforms. By formulating a comprehensive typology of biaoqing genres, I foreground the situated socio-technical specificities of their circulation: the creative play with typographical compositions, the affective repurposing of graphical emoticons, the platformed monetization of proprietary stickers, and the user-driven proliferation of custom images. Drawing on this typology, I argue for the need to recognize the circulation of biaoqing as an emergent and malleable category of semiotic resources profoundly shaped by two decades of development of the Internet in China.

A paper survey of 489 Chinese college students was conducted in spring, 2012 to test a conceptual model of
online information disclosure in social media. It shows that young Chinese SNS users’ prior negative experience
of online disclosure significantly increased their online privacy concerns and their perceived risk. Their
online privacy concerns undermined their trust of online companies, marketers and laws to protect privacy
and elevated their perceived risk. Their trust strongly predicted their intent to disclose the lifestyle and sensitive
information. Their online privacy concerns only inhibited them from disclosing sensitive information in
social media. However, their prior negative experience did not directly predict their intent of self-disclosure
on SNS. Implications for academia and industry are discussed.

This chapter introduces the specificities of the Chinese wanghong economy and its implications for the existing spatial relationships in Chinese contemporary society. The wanghong industry first of all fits into the Party State’s agenda of restructuring the economy and boosting employment, while its mass participation and immense diversity also lead to the Party State’s mixed approach of both protection and censorship. At the local level, the well-established ICT infrastructure propels the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings.
For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning, and emotional management. the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings.
For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning and emotional management. monetisation on the side of individual creators. It is for this reason that the unlikely creativity of wanghong culture becomes desirable to creators and their online communities, serving as an imagined alternative to the tedious or normative everyday work as either cook, farmer, high-school teacher or college graduate waiting to be hired by companies. Taken out of the local context, these seemingly “bizarre” and “inadequate” creativities turn out to be highly entertaining and relevant and add flavour to the banal everyday life.

The aim of this article collection is to examine Chinese social media
technology and culture as a distinctive form of mediated communication
and practice. The Internet and social media have grown and become an
essential part of the society and economy in China in ways that are
increasingly dissimilar from that of the social media platforms outside of
China. From the early roll out of the Internet, to the now pervasive
presence of social media, Chinese Internet culture continues to reflect
the unique interplay of technological changes, language affordances (i.e.
Chinese as a character-based script), software development, usergenerated
interactional practices, and government censorship. Social
media platforms and practices provide a rich, yet surprisingly underexplored
source for the analysis of new and innovative practices within
the distinct context of communication technologies and platforms for
nearly one billion users. The papers in this article collection contribute
further to examining how the technologies and technological affordances
of Chinese social media interact to afford distinctive discursive and
linguistic practices across a range of interactional contexts.

"Ming Loyalism" stands out from other traditional ideologies of Chinese dissent for it bundles ideologies in numerous distinct and separate fields. Calling for actual revival of the old dynasty seemed increasingly anachronistic as times progressed in the way of Republican-style governments, but the spirit and abstract concept of "Repel the Qing and Restore the Ming" continues to reverberate amongst the youth of the 21st Century. This paper will identify Ming Loyalism as a contender in alternative expressions of contemporary Chinese nationalism. The author draws on the plethora of its manifestations in the Chinese mass-market: texts and images in fictional and non-fictional literature, online games and multimedia, and even fashion to argue that Internet and social media instigated the next evolution of Chinese nationalism-as a popular mass culture. The focus of this new 'traditionalism' is celebratory and pragmatically business-minded: Gaining 'market share' of Chinese minds and searching for innovative ways to integrate ethnic ideology into a modern consumer lifestyle may be the next phase of expressing patriotic pride.

"Ming Loyalism" stands out from other traditional ideologies of Chinese dissent for it bundles ideologies in numerous distinct and separate fields. Calling for actual revival of the old dynasty seemed increasingly anachronistic as times progressed in the way of Republican-style governments, but the spirit and abstract concept of "Repel the Qing and Restore the Ming" continues to reverberate amongst the youth of the 21st Century. This paper will identify Ming Loyalism as a contender in alternative expressions of contemporary Chinese nationalism. The author draws on the plethora of its manifestations in the Chinese mass-market: texts and images in fictional and non-fictional literature, online games and multimedia, and even fashion to argue that Internet and social media instigated the next evolution of Chinese nationalism-as a popular mass culture. The focus of this new 'traditionalism' is celebratory and pragmatically business-minded: Gaining 'market share' of Chinese minds and searching for innovative ways to integrate ethnic ideology into a modern consumer lifestyle may be the next phase of expressing patriotic pride.

We report results from a series of experiments that uncover mechanisms used to filter images on WeChat, the most popular social media platform in China. Our results inform strategies for evading image filtering on the application. By performing tests on a collection of politically sensitive images filtered by WeChat, we found that WeChat uses two different algorithms to filter, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-based algorithm that filters images containing sensitive text, and a visual-based algorithm that filters images that are visually similar to those on an image blacklist. The OCR-based algorithm has implementation similarities to many common OCR algorithms that allow us to create text images that evade filtering. We found that the visual-based algorithm does not use any machine learning approach that uses high level classification of an image to determine whether it is sensitive; however, we discovered multiple implementation details of the visual-based algorithm that inform the creation of images that are visually similar to those blacklisted but that evade filtering. This study is the first in-depth technical analysis of image filtering on WeChat, and we hope that our methods will serve as a road map for studying image censorship on other platforms.

In China, deepfakes are commonly known as huanlian, which literally means “changing faces.” Huanlian content, including face-swapped images and video reenactments, has been circulating in China since at least 2018, at first through amateur users experimenting with machine learning models and then through the popularization of audiovisual synthesis technologies offered by digital platforms. Informed by a wealth of interdisciplinary research on media manipulation, this presentation aims at historicizing, contextualizing, and disaggregating huanlian in order to understand how synthetic media is domesticated in China.

A written survey of 489 Chinese college students was conducted in the spring of
2012 to test a conceptual model of consumers’ regulatory support for social media
advertising. It showed that the prior negative experience of consumers in online
disclosure directly increased their privacy concerns and perceived risks in
disclosing on social networking websites. Online privacy concerns, trust, and risk
strengthened their support for the government regulation of social media
advertising, while trust and social media use enhanced support for industry selfregulation.
Surprisingly, the prior negative experiences of young Chinese
consumers did not reduce their social media use and had little direct effect on
their support for regulations. The implications of the findings for digital interactive
marketers and governmental and self-regulatory agencies are discussed.

In the digital age of social media and the Internet, social media companies exploit the
labour that generates user data as commodity and hide this purpose behind the idea of
“free access”. This phenomenon not only exists in the West, but also in China. This
chapter examines the case of the three most heavily used Chinese social media
platforms – Renren, Weibo and Youku – as exemplifying the commodification of user
data. It discusses how use-value and value are generated and how capital is
accumulated on these platforms. It then goes through Marx”s theory of ideology and
concludes that “free access” is an ideology used by Chinese capitalist companies to
legitimate the usage of online advertising and to promote the exploitation of digital
labour.

The days of China simply being a country that copies, pirates and counterfeits US and European technology is coming to end. Platforms like social and mobile are at the forefront of China’s current technological revolution. We are truly living in an interconnected world and this interconnectedness is creating a whole host of ways to market a product and/or a service. Chinese blogs, micro-blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds are leading this new technological revolution. Companies like WeChat, QQ, Weibo, Hexun, Youku, Jiepang, Qieke, Ushi, Taobao and Ku6 are all experiencing exponential growth. In China, the competition for consumers is incredibly fierce, especially in the social media space. This competition, however, does have a dark side: many companies regularly employ ‘artificial writers’ to seed positive content about themselves online and attack competitors with negative news they hope will go viral. On the e-commerce front, Taobao has formed a synergistic partnership in which store owners on Taobao create accounts on Weibo and utilise it as a channel to market their products and communicate with customers. On the virtual social world front, China might also be leading the world with sites like yy.com, which have figured out a way to monetise karaoke. Technology has always moved at the
speed of light, but today the barriers of culture, language and communication are falling by the wayside and China is finding itself at the forefront of this new technological revolution.

A paper survey of 489 Chinese college students in spring, 2012 showed that young Chinese Internet
users’ prior negative experience of online disclosure increased their online privacy concerns that
elevated their perceived risk and undermined their trust. Their prior negative experience also positively
predicted their intent to falsify personal information online. Their online privacy concerns mediated the
impact of prior negative experience on their intent to refuse information provision, ask for removal of
their personal information, spread negative eWOM, and complain to online companies. Their heightened
risk enhanced their intent to falsify personal information online, to ask for removal of their personal
information, and to report to authority.

Abstract
According to the latest Digital report of 2018 (Kemp 2018), the total number of Internet users has reached 4.021 billion. The majority (3,196 billion) are active on social networks.
Social media are playing a very important role in every field: from the economic to the social.
A particular role of change is occurring in Asia, where the dynamics of use are very different from those in the Western world. For example, applications such as WhatsApp are not widely used in China, South Korea or Japan. In fact, Japanese users prefer the app Line (developed in Japan). Similar to that, in South Korea people use KakaoTalk, and in China, only WeChat is used – because, other apps, mostly the social networks used in the West, are not accessible.
This study will analyze the situation of social media in general, giving an overview of the state of art in the world, and then focus on the situation in China, where compared to the rest of the world, social media are having a very different evolution. Some examples are WeChat (a messaging app with social network features) or dating apps like Tinder, which although banned in China, have several clones, such as Tantan, Momo, Soul or Jimu.
This research is manly founded on the studies carried out by Costa (2016) and aims to cover the lack, in the academic world, about the social media situation in Asia and above all to focus on the particular Chinese contest, in order to have an idea about the actual situation and how it has been changing over the years.

In the field of social media the instant messaging is a very important. Applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger and Line have had a great technological evolution, turning them into powerful social media.
What many scholars ignore is the fact that in East Asia instant messaging has developed in a way different from those used in the Western world. For example, Line is the main instant messaging in Japan and KakaoTalk in Korea.
A particular case occurs in China where there is only one instant messaging called WeChat that has the monopoly because most of the social media in China such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Line and KakaoTalk are banned by the government.
WeChat was born as a copy of the most famous WhatsApp, then it has evolved in a very different way from the original: this App has tried to fill a gap that was in the social media in China by introducing, for example, a function called moments, where users can publish photos, short videos and their friends can comment them.
Afterwards WeChat introduced Mini-programs which are additional functions that allow the users to order food, buy tickets for cinema and trains, rent bikes and much more. All this is supported by a payment model called WeChatpay that can be used to pay in every big shop in China.
All the other social media are interested in the WeChat model as a method of payment, hence they have started to try this new method but their attempt failed because of the lack of shops willing to do that.
On the contrary WeChatpay together with Alipay have spread all over the world and it is normal to see at the airports or in tourist areas Chinese tourists paying with these methods of payment.
The main aim of this study is to analyze the social media, such as Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat in order to outline their evolution focusing on WeChat as case study.
Furthermore, in the introduction there will be an accurate and updated analysis of the most important social media in China.

A paper survey of 489 Chinese college students in spring, 2012 showed that young Chinese Internet users’ prior negative experience of online disclosure increased their online privacy concerns that elevated their perceived risk and undermined their trust. Their prior negative experience also positively
predicted their intent to falsify personal information online. Their online privacy concerns mediated the impact of prior negative experience on their intent to refuse information provision, ask for removal of their personal information, spread negative eWOM, and complain to online companies. Their heightened risk enhanced their intent to falsify personal information online, to ask for removal of their personal
information, and to report to authority.

Multiple modes of communication on social media can contribute to public diplomacy in informing, conversing, and networking with members of foreign publics. However, manipulative behaviours on social media, prevalent especially in high tension contexts, create disruptions to authentic communication in what could be grey/black propaganda or information warfare. This study reviews existing literature about models of public diplomacy to guide an empirical study of China's communication in the #SouthChinaSea conversation on Twitter. It uses computational methods to identify, record, and analyze one-way, two-way, and network communication of China's actors. It employs manual qualitative research to determine the nature of China's actors. On that basis, it assesses China's Twitter communication in the issue against various models of public diplomacy.

This paper reassesses comparisons of online Chinese networks to the Habermasian public sphere through a dialogue between sinology and ludology. Play has long been considered an integral component of public activity and of the Chinese internet. Researchers emphasised the importance of playful behavior and creative self-expressions for various purposes, including the formation of community ties and identities. However, studies tend to scrutinise the socio-political effects of playing rather than the fundamental connections between play and cultural life. This paper investigates the underlying cultural elements of play that are absent from or underdeveloped in the rational-critical framework and discourses of the public sphere. Building upon this ludological tradition, and specifically focusing on the autotelic, contextual, and appropriative nature of play, we conduct an exploratory, inductive thematic analysis of three case studies that garnered significant domestic and international attention – the abolishment of term limits in China, the #MeToo movement, and the COVID-19 pandemic – to understand the role of play in public communication. Our analysis reveals insights into the creative structural dynamics that underpin the Chinese internet – rules, reciprocity, and irrationality – three aspects that broaden discussions of online activity and engagement. The paper centers itself at the nexus of three separate strands of histories – the public sphere debate, ludology, and the Chinese internet – that have rarely been in dialogue with one another and, in doing so, examines and explains the Chinese cybersphere’s current formation.

A written survey of 489 Chinese college students was conducted in the spring of 2012 to test a conceptual model of consumers’ regulatory support for social media advertising. It showed that the prior negative experience of consumers in online disclosure directly increased their privacy concerns and perceived risks in disclosing on social networking websites. Online privacy concerns, trust, and risk strengthened their support for the government regulation of social media
advertising, while trust and social media use enhanced support for industry self-regulation. Surprisingly, the prior negative experiences of young Chinese consumers did not reduce their social media use and had little direct effect on their support for regulations. The implications of the findings for digital interactive marketers and governmental and self-regulatory agencies are discussed.

Launched by Chinese digital media conglomerate Tencent in 2011, WeChat has quickly become China’s most widely used instant messaging application. Over eight years of development and updates, WeChat has gradually accrued more functions and affordances, establishing its centrality as a media sharing tool, social platform, digital wallet, and multi-purpose utility provider. In a process common to other dominant digital platforms companies (such as Facebook or Google), Tencent’s WeChat exhibits an increasing number of features that are typically associated with infrastructures, as seeks to position itself as a central component of Chinese everyday life (Plantin & de Seta, 2019). Most of WeChat’s features have a social component – from instant messaging and group chats to user profile feeds and commenting system – and yet Tencent has developed the app according to design decisions and operating principles very different from comparable services. WeChat is chiefly app-based, offering only a rudimentary Web-based functionality; users have minimally public profiles, and the only ways to add contacts is to know their phone number/ID or through physical proximity search; personal profile posts are visible only to one’s contacts, and user comments are only visible to the user’s own contacts; groups are joined through invitation. WeChat’s design philosophy privileges centralization, nesting a wide range of services inside a single, cross-platform app (albeit available in two noticeably different versions for the Chinese and the international market). This centralization of functions and services is combined with interface limitations and proprietary standards that all contribute to the locking-in of users. WeChat’s API are limited to the interfacing of a few basic WeChat functions with external applications; its Official Accounts function is managed from inside the app itself; the recently introduced “Mini-Programs” are applets coded in a proprietary Tencent language that can be deployed only inside WeChat. Confronted with this peculiar digital platform – one that is rich in functionalities but also tightly self-enclosed– WeChat users develop forms of sociality that are shaped by WeChat’s interactional affordances and development history. In this presentation, based on ethnographic observations of WeChat sociality conducted between 2013 and 2019, I describe various “connective practices” through which users establish personal connections and group networks, and evidence how they navigate and exploit the “selective visibility” afforded by the app’s design. The active efforts required from users to connect and make interactions visible result in a peculiar way of “curating sociality” on the platform.

A paper survey of 489 Chinese college students was conducted in spring, 2012 to test a conceptual model of online information disclosure in social media. It shows that young Chinese SNS users’ prior negative experience of online disclosure significantly increased their online privacy concerns and their perceived risk. Their online privacy concerns undermined their trust of online companies, marketers and laws to protect privacy and elevated their perceived risk. Their trust strongly predicted their intent to disclose the lifestyle and sensitive information. Their online privacy concerns only inhibited them from disclosing sensitive information in
social media. However, their prior negative experience did not directly predict their intent of self-disclosure on SNS. Implications for academia and industry are discussed.