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ABSTRACT
Discussion is often celebrated as a critical element of public opinion and political participation. Recently, scholars have suggested that the design and features of specific online platforms shape what is politically expressed online and how. Building on these findings and drawing on 112 semi-structured qualitative interviews with information technology experts and internet users, we explain how major Chinese social media platforms differ in structure and motivation. Drawing upon a nationwide representative survey and an online experiment, we find that platforms aiming to make users a source of information through public, information-centred communication, such as the Twitter-like Weibo, are more conducive to political expression; while platforms built to optimize building social connections through private, user-centred communication, such as WhatsApp and Facebook-like WeChat, tend to inhibit political expression. These technological design effects are stronger when users believe the authoritarian state tolerates discussion, but less important when political talk is sensitive. The findings contribute to the debate on the political consequences of the internet by specifying technological and political conditions.
Acknowledgements
This article is dedicated to the memory of the late Mayling Birney (1972–2017) whose research on voicing opinions in Chinese surveys inspired this research. For insightful comments and feedback regarding earlier versions of this research we would like to thank Lily Tsai, Pierre Landry, Devra Coren-Moehler, Liz Suhay, Rosario Aguilar, and the participants of talks at Duke University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University – Shanghai, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Hertie School of Governance. For superb research assistance we are grateful to Keri Hartman, Yuzhu Zhang, Hanyu Jiang, and Allison Koh.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
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2 Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0.
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75 Stockmann, “Media Commercialization.”
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Notes on contributors
Daniela Stockmann
Daniela Stockmann is Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School. She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2007). Before joining the Hertie School faculty, she was Associate Professor of Political Science at Leiden University. Her research interests include comparative politics, political behavior, political communication, and research methodology. Her book, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China (Cambridge University Press, 2013), received the 2015 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.
Ting Luo
Ting Luo is Lecturer of Political Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has previously worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Leiden University and at Hertie School, Berlin. She received her PhD in government from LSE. Her research interests include comparative politics with a specialization on China, digital politics, elections and democratization.
Mingming Shen
Mingming Shen is professor at the School of Government, director of the Research Center of Contemporary China, and director of the Center for Empirical Research and Quantitative Analysis in Political Science at Beijing University. His research and teaching focus on comparative politics, American government and politics, and social science research methodologies. He has consulted for numerous international organizations including the World Bank, World Health Organization, Asian Development Bank, UNDP and others.