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Following a burgeoning literature on private actors under digital authoritarianism, this study aims to understand the role played by social media users in sustaining authoritarian rule. It examines a subcultural community—the queer-fantasy community—on Chinese social media to expound how members of this community interpreted China's censorship policy, interacted based on the interpretation, and participated in censorship. Integrating structural topic modeling and emergent coding, this study finds that a political environment of uncertainty fostered divergent imaginaries about censorship. These imaginaries encouraged participatory censorship within the online community, which strengthened the political control of the Internet in the absence of the state. This study illuminates how participatory censorship works, especially in non-professional and non-politically mobilized online communities. With a focus on social media users, it also offers a lens for future research to compare peer-based surveillance and content moderation in authoritarian and democratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body of literature on underrepresentation and gender inequality is vast. However, despite its potential to perpetuate gender stereotypes, the overrepresentation of women in media has received inadequate attention. This study explores how traditional news media and social media overrepresent females as drivers when discussing traffic accidents, and whether social media could be the 'new equalizer' for gender. Focusing on China, we collected 97,120 posts from Weibo, China's largest microblogging site, and 11,290 newspaper articles dated between January 2010 and November 2018. We analyzed the data through a mixed-methods design and found that female drivers are overrepresented in discussions of traffic accidents, in both newspapers and on Weibo. While the gender bias against female drivers is more prevalent on Weibo than in newspapers, Weibo has provided a platform for gender-aware discussion. Our study closes by offering suggestions for cross-platform and cross-cultural comparisons of gender representation in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares American, British, and Chinese news coverage of Internet privacy policies. Specifically, we examine media discourse about the “real-name” policies established by Facebook and Weibo. We find that U.S. and UK news coverage of Internet privacy policy is broadly similar, when compared with the more authoritarian–corporatist media system in China. British and U.S. newspapers were much more independent from state control, and were able to maintain a more critical stance than the Chinese newspapers. But there were additional factors that shaped the patterns in news discourse in complicated ways, which are related to (a) the difference between domestic and international news genres, (b) specific narratives about national identity, and (c) more general discourses about civil society, democracy, and the public good. We suggest that the range of comparative media research can be extended by paying attention to how these cultural factors interact with media system dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]