Douyin’s Playful Platform Governance: Platform’s Self-regulation and Content Creators’ Participatory Surveillance

To mediate the tensions between state regulation and content creator incentives,Chinese social media platforms develop an interesting practice of using platform official accounts to communicate its rules to the creator community.These accounts anthropomorphize platforms,enabling platforms to represent their regulatory bodies with fictional human characters or animated figures. The phenomenon of platform anthropomorphization in the Chinese context stems from a different ontological understanding of platform governance. The first part of this article discusses the logic of platform governance in China, and highlights a different state-platform relationship in comparison to the U.S and European countries. In the second part, this article turns to focus on Douyinas a case study to further investigate how Chinese social media platforms establish rules and govern content creators. By analysing Douyin’s public-facing policy documents and its platform official account, Douyin Safety Centre, we reveal a mechanism of playful governance.