The second speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Ziying Meng, whose focus is on self-governance in creator cultures in western and Chinese contexts. There still are considerable differences between the US-dominated western and Chinese platform ecologies, in spite of the rise of TikTok as a global platform; this represents a kind of parallel universe of platforms, with differing governance frameworks.
Chinese platforms are governed by Chinese state policies, while US-based platforms operate under western capitalist conditions; nonetheless there is also a global creator culture, which must arrange itself with these parallel ecologies. Ziying engaged in cross-platform, transnational digital ethnography research to investigate the experiences especially of creators who operate across both those systems.
Each participant in this study operated across at least five distinct platforms. They employed a range of practices to navigate their differing operational logics, learning their rules and playing the visibility game within them, but also imposing their own rules on their activities on these platforms, and engaging in some self-censorship to ensure their survival as content creators.
This might include the depoliticisation of their content, managing potential risks by anticipating platform content policies, and editing / self-censoring content in different ways for different platforms. This constitutes a balancing act between imaginaries, ambitions, and precautions, and requires flexibility in navigating between compliance and resistance in different contexts.
