In early November, Assistant Professor Wang Ningxin at the Division of Development and Governance, the School of Humanities and Social Science, published an article in Social Media + Society, the top journal in the field of communication.

01 About the Paper 

Title：

Participatory Censorship with Illusory Empowerment: Algorithmic Folklore and Interpretive Labor beyond Fandom

《虚幻赋权的参与式审查：超越粉丝圈的算法民俗与诠释性劳动》 

link

https://doi.org/ 10.1177/20563051241295800

Introduction

This paper explores the cultural complexity of participatory censorship practices among young Chinese netizens, especially within and outside fan communities, through the perspective of digital ethnography. By studying the interaction between social media practices and state governance, this study introduces the theoretical frameworks of algorithmic folklore and interpretive labor to illustrate how social media users participate in censorship both as a daily routine task of constructing community identity and as a form of negotiation to legitimize their actions. Through immersive online community participant observation and in-depth interviews with 25 informants who participated in social media cyberbullying, this study illustrates that while fans view their participation in cyberbullying as a form of empowerment, they are also the targets of social media cyberbullying, and the interaction of fan conflicts is closely related to the broader sociocultural context.

02 About the Journal

Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed academic journal that focuses on the sociocultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal, and policy dimensions of social media in past, present, and future societies. The journal publishes interdisciplinary works from the social sciences, humanities, and computational social sciences, extending to the arts and natural sciences, and the journal is open to a variety of theoretical paradigms and methods. The journal has an impact factor of 5.5 in 2023 and a five-year impact factor of 6.8, ranking in JCR Q1 (ranked 5th among 227 communication journals) and the TOP of the CAS literature zone 1.

03 About Prof. Erika Ningxin Wang

Prof. Erika Ningxin Wang is currently an assistant professor at the Division of Development and Governance, the School of Humanities and Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. She is a media anthropologist and digital ethnographer, and received her PhD in Culture, Media and Creative Industries from King’s College London. Her research areas include new media, cultural and creative industries, cultural policy and market, algorithms and platform governance, fans and popular culture.