After account bombing: Chinese digital feminists haunt platform censorship as cyber living ghosts

ABSTRACT

Account bombing, in which social media accounts are enforced and permanently suspended by platforms, has become widespread as Internet censorship has escalated in recent years. This article examines the phenomenon of Chinese digital feminists’ accounts being bombed out on Weibo. We conceptualize the bombed feminists as cyber “living ghosts”, aiming to investigate how these censored feminists navigate their enforced disappearance and how they haunt a digital patriarchal authoritarian regime. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews and thematic analysis, we found three distinct coping tactics, that is: a) ghostly gaze, reflectivity, and visibility-manipulation; b) the undying practices of negation; and c) ghostly wanderings beyond Weibo. The spectralization of feminists enables the formation of in-betweenness of (dis)embodiment, position, and space. Through observing in the (in)visibility, defying the platform censor rules, and transcending in online-offline nexus, they develop an alternative and flexible worldmaking practice that is decentralized and ever-changing in an increasingly restrictive, unsupported, and authoritarian context.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet censorship
• digital feminists
• account bombing
• platform
• cyber living ghosts

Introduction

On March 31 2021, the 10-year-old Weibo account of a feminist, Xiao Meili, was “bombed out” after posting a video denouncing gender violence. She recounted her experience of being assaulted by a group of men for opposing publicly smoking. The video went viral on the internet, garnering widespread support, even from government-affiliated accounts. However, a sudden twist came the following day when nationalist groups, often referred to as anti-feminists, unearthed an old image from 2014 where Xiao expressed solidarity with Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. They mischaracterized it as evidence of her advocacy for “Hong Kong independence,” triggering a wave of online attacks on Xiao and other feminist accounts supporting her as “xenocentric” and “anti-China.” Shortly afterwards, Xiao’s account was forcibly suspended and a considerable number of feminist supporters faced a similar fate.

Account bombing, literally zhahao in Chinese, pertains to the mandatory and permanent deactivation of user accounts. This punitive measure by platforms is often enacted without transparency, leaving users uncertain about the specific content that violated rules. The large-scale suspension of feminist accounts, typified by the case of Xiao, reflects a discernible trend in the escalating oversight and subjugation of feminist voices on social platforms like Weibo, and indicates the tangled power dynamics of anti-feminism, online misogyny, and nationalism behind the platform’s crackdown on these gender issues (Xiao Han 2018; Qiqi Huang 2023; Banet-Weiser Sarah 2018).

Digital feminists face increasing repression and censorship in China (Jinyan Zeng 2021). On Chinese social media platforms, feminism has always been a highly controversial and sensitive topic, owing to its Western origins and its perceived linkage with social and political reform (Qiqi Huang 2023). The spread of the #MeToo movement to China since 2018 has reinforced the sensitivities surrounding feminist discourse on the Internet. An illustrative example of this crackdown was the permanent suspension of the influential feminist account Feminist Voices (女权之声) on Weibo in March 2018, subsequently followed by increased censorship efforts to curb feminist content and amplify online misogyny (Sara Liao 2023). Netizens who articulate critiques of gender inequality or the inequitable treatment of women are frequently accused of “affecting social stability” or “promoting gender antagonism.” Although feminists used puns, guerrilla-style actions, and avoided direct criticism of the government to bypass censorship (Ling Han and Chengpang Lee 2018; Jing Zeng 2020), censorship has adapted and employed digital features that support #MeToo to suppress progressive politics (Sara Liao and Luwei Rose Luqiu 2022). Specifically, it refined the keywords identification system to enhance flexible word supervision of puns (Qu Tracy 2022), introduced a new mechanism for reporting “provoking hate” in 2021, and sanctioned users for “creating gender antagonism” (Wanqing Zhang 2021). These affordances conspire with the state’s stigmatization of feminism as a radical misandric discourse (Liao 2023) and feminist rhetoric is more likely to be labeled as extreme feminism, leading to their account closure (Kai Bao 2023). Notably, the platform seldom blocks misogynistic and sexist opinions (Han 2018) and regulates content according to the government’s ideological control. This emphasizes the resilience of China’s digital authoritarianism (Rongbin Han 2018; Yunya Song and Tsan-Kuo Chang 2017), which not only adapts to digitalization but upholds pro-patriarchal and legitimating anti-feminist discourses to impede any social forces that might cause “social unrest” or threaten the legitimacy of the government.

In this sense, feminists’ Weibo account bombing is the result of digital patriarchal authoritarianism, whose online disappearance inevitably results from the intensification of feminist-targeted resilient censorship by platform regulators. Current research focuses on the evasion tactics from online misogyny and censorship (Shamika Dixit 2022; Xiao Han 2018; Tan Jia 2017; Sara Liao 2023). Sacre empirical research explores the trajectories of censored feminists enduring account suspension. This article investigates the consequence of censorship on Weibo, namely account bombing. In such case, the user account remains logged in and accessible to the content, but devoids of interaction capabilities and is publicly displayed as an invalid account, showing “content does not exist”. We employ the concept of “living ghosts” (Esther Peeren 2014, 5) to metaphorically illustrate this state and analyze their experiences of enforced disappearance and resilience. The notion represents a spectral figuration of a suppressed subjectivity formed in the present, generally powerless but with the potential to challenge existing power structures. We conceptualize cyber “living ghosts” as new forms of subjectivity for these censored feminists to scrutinize how these digital feminists perform as cyber living ghosts after their account bombing. Specifically, we investigate their responses to online disappearance, engagement with platform censorship, and formulation of new feminist sense-making strategies.

Cyber living ghosts, we argue, can be considered as a decentralized new form of subjectivity that is neither static nor unchanging, but rather serves as an agentive and reflexive process. As David Trend (2016) emphasizes, the notion aligns with the idea of “worlding,” which concerns the transformative process impacting individuals, groups, and world dynamics that shape them. The spectral worldmaking associated with cyber “living ghosts” represents a political and empowering form of subjectivity that takes place on the fringes of power structures, and serves as a means of knowledge (re)production that has the potential to challenge boundaries of thoughts and action (Verónica Gago and Liz Mason-Deese 2019).

Account bombing in digital China

“Account bombing” is a digital phenomenon deeply rooted in China’s state-initiated Internet regulation campaigns. It entails the permanent banning of social media accounts on platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin (Hui Fang and Shangwei Wu 2022). As described by Wu and Fang (2023, 2), this results in “permanent bans leave users no chance to get their accounts back to normal, rendering the accounts and their content invisible to the public.” Users are deprived of their rights of commenting, chatting, and posting, with little to no explanation from the platforms. Those targeted by account bombing experience a rollercoaster of emotions, including anger, anxiety, despair, regret, sadness, and surprise. Despite their attempts to recover their accounts through formal complaints, users often face futility (Fang and Wu 2022). As it is common for users to treat their social media accounts as personal archives and even private property, account bombing causes not only emotional distress but also a profound sense of personal loss (Wu and Fang 2023).

In essence, account bombing represents a digital death sentence unique within Chinese contexts. It differs from “deplatforming” (Helen Innes and Martin Innes 2023) in Western literature that typically pertains to the removal or restriction of individuals or organizations from online platforms due to content violations, as account bombing is deeply entwined with state-driven regulations. It also distinguishes from “digital suicide” (Karppi Tero 2011), which refers to voluntary disconnection from social media for personal reasons, whereas account bombing is a malicious and involuntary act that targets users. Additionally, in contrast to studies that signify social networking platforms as mourning sites following an individual’s death (Jed R Brubaker, Gillian R Hayes and Paul Dourish 2013), the consequence of account bombing is the other way around, whose inactive social media account impacts living individuals and leads to the disappearance of their online presence. This underscores the distinctive nature of account bombing within China’s digital landscape, indicating the pronounced power imbalances between the government, social media platforms, and users.

The opacity of violating regulations, the irreversibility of account-bombing, and the pro-government stance of the platform collectively legitimize the deprivation of users’ agency in their relations with platforms, where withdrawal is passive, compulsory, unquestionable, and non-negotiable.

The spectral figuration of suspended digital feminists

Living ghosts and spectral agency

Facing the repressive online environment in China, Fang and Wu (2022) have observed “death sentence” and “ghosts” are terms that the blocked users frequently use to describe their beings who face the enforced account suspension, as social media is deeply intertwined with their daily lives. However, the spectral status and the political implications of spectrality in the high-censored Chinese digital space are not further explored. To fill this gap, we figure digital Weibo feminists, who were once sentenced to a digital death by the platform, as cyber living ghosts to haunt and exert power. “Living ghosts”, raised by Peeren (2014), is a spectral figuration of repressed subjectivities produced in and by the present, such as migrants, servants, mediums, and missing persons. This spectralization of subjects in the western contexts dates back to the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (Jacques Derrida 1994), which configures the victims of war, capitalist imperialism, and totalitarianism as the ghosts of collective histories and introduces “hauntology” to describe the persistent influence of the past on the present. Following this, Avery Gordon (1997) explores ghostly figures of the past into a wider contexts of modern forms of exploitation and further elaborate ghostly presences as the lingering past, as the luminous presence of things neglected and banished, and as a structure of feeling of “something-to-be-done.” In contrast to their framing of ghosts that come from the past and indicates the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present” (Derrida 1994, xix), Peeren (2014) broadens the notion of spectrality to include subjects emerging in an unfair present. By introducing the concept of “living ghost,” she focuses on “those people who, already in their lifetime, resemble dispossessed ghosts in that they are ignored and considered expendable, or, sometimes at the same time, become objects of intense fear and violent attempts at extermination (14)”. By stressing the contemporaneity of ghosts and the ongoing institutional environments that produce them, Peeren (2014, 16) proposes the concept of “spectral agency,” which denotes the insistence to reappear and disrupt the norms, even among the unactualized. This perspective drags the discussion of spectrality from the haunted to the haunting subjects themselves, through which “we can take control over troubling memories” and “may turn destructive haunting into something more enabling” (Walter R Jacobs 2007, 7). This calls back to Gordon’s argument that haunting is an alternative method of sociological research, capable of revealing the presence of that which appears absent and can produce reality and truth. As an integral part of established social and political systems, haunting serves as an indicator of what was forcefully eradicated or excluded, namely, the “other” that jeopardized the emerging dominance (Gordon 1997).

Following Gordon, Lisa Blackman (2015, 26) raises a method of embodied hauntology for knowledge production that works with “the traces, fragments, fleeting moments, gaps, absences, submerged narratives, and displaced actors and agencies that register affectively.” This approach signifies an experimental method for exploring spectral agency characterized by an integration of a fluid constructedness of identity/being and a focus upon localized and embodied materializations of it (Judith Butler 1993). Haunting, in this context, is not an intrinsic quality of ghosts, but rather a cultivated skill that is acquired over time (Esther Peeren 2020). To become a haunting ghost, one must consistently conform to the established norms of spectrality, embodying the essence of ghostly conduct. For example, spectral qualities that enable the blurring of visibility-invisibility, real-unreal boundaries, the transgression of time and space, the decentering effect, and the arousal of affect among the remain, open up new possibilities of resistance, continuity, and change (Maria del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013; Gordon 1997; Tobias Jung and Kevin Orr 2021).

Ghosts and haunting in feminist scholarship

Spectral formulations have grown in frequency in studies of feminism in the past decade. Maintaining a haunted connection with the feminist past enables us to recognize the untapped potentials of that past and actively resist the controlling and defensive tendencies that have characterized feminism’s recent interactions with its multifaceted history (Victoria Hesford 2005). Recognizing feminism as an unfinished endeavor, scholars speculate feminism as a kind of ghost, whose haunting presence still pervades popular culture (Angela McRobbie 2009). Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters (2014, 20) see feminism not only as an ontology but also a hauntology, “a way of being that is shaped by anxieties about the past, concern for the future and an overarching uncertainty about its own status and ability to effect change in a world where its necessity is perpetually cast into doubt.”

Apart from a reminder of feminist inheritance, ghostliness, and haunting also indicate feminist otherness in lesbian or black feminist studies. To unravel the agency of queer subjectivities, the status of ghostliness has been used to address their dispossessing histories and imagine more inclusive futures (Carla Freccero 2013). By terming “lesbian ghost,” Ilana Eloit and Clare Hemmings (2019) unveil the concealed or playful aspects of marginalized lesbian figures within feminism and other contexts, and the latent subjects, practices, and histories hidden beneath the surface of dominant lesbian narratives that haunt lesbian identity, community, politics, and theory. Similarly, Viviane Saleh-Hanna (2015) raises the framework of black feminist hauntology in the face of the silent yet visible and enduring realities of colonialism in feminist movements. Not only viewing ghost as a noun or a phenomenon, but they also consider it as a method and genre that allow feminist scholars to produce alternative reality and truth obscured by dominant histories, both within and outside feminism.

Comparatively, limited research directly reveals the implication of spectrality in digital feminism. Still, existing studies have revealed that cyberspace itself has its ghostly potential, ranging from the spectral architecture of the Internet to the way digital technologies are used to shape politics and policing. “Cyberspace hauntology” (Isabella van Elferen 2009, 102) allows an online status of being silently present and potentially awakened to disturb safe borders, where those beyond the realm of the visible can exert influence through the digital realm. The usage of digital archives and databases has blurred the temporal boundaries between the absent past and the present, making the past constantly present and accessible (Nicolette Little 2022). Moreover, digital contexts offer a hybrid spatial experience of spectrality, enabling the simultaneity of diverse (dis)embodied presences. As Jeffrey Sconce (2000, 8) argues, digital technologies enable “an uncanny form of disembodiment, allowing the communicating subject the ability … to leave the body and transport his or her consciousness to a distant destination.” In this sense, the digital sphere presents an alternative version of ghostly hauntings, different from those emphasized in the previous feminist research, focusing on a present absence structured by the involvement of digital technologies.

In Chinese contexts, it is important to note that the strong internet surveillance in digital space deprives individuals of their legitimate presence on certain digital platforms. The production of ghostliness in Chinese cyberspace, thus derives not only from new media attributes, but also from the strong Internet surveillance that can block one’s platform-based presence and force them to disappear online. In this vein, the spectral formulation can be adopted as a novel tool in Chinese digital feminist studies to explore the political implications of the subordinate, where the spectre arises as a destabilizing impulse from within the resources of political hegemony.

Methodological considerations

Informed by the principles of situated knowledge (Donna Haraway 1988) and (self-)reflexivity (Wanda Pillow 2003), we endeavor to state our positionality and contextualize our research agenda at first. This research is grounded in our personal online experiences. As active Weibo users and feminist researchers, we find ourselves navigating an increasingly narrowed digital space for expressive communication. The heightened practice of self-censorship, the ongoing guerrilla tug-of-war against platform regulations, and the surging cases of account bombing, bring our attention to the pronounced scrutiny and sensitivity surrounding gender-related topics on Weibo, as well as the vulnerability of feminist accounts. This experience, along with our ongoing (self-)reflection, serve as a critical entry point for exploring the dynamics of online presence and absence, and the ghostly subjectivity of suspended feminists.

We conduct in-depth interviews to answer how banned feminists, haunt as cyber living ghosts, respond to their online disappearance, interact with platform censorship, and formulate new strategies for feminist sense-making. Participants recruitment adheres to four criteria: (a) Weibo users, senior users are preferred with years of experience and daily use time of more than 2 hours; (b) Weibo serves as a primary medium for accessing news and information, and frequently express personal viewpoints on this platform; (c) Self-identification as a feminist; and (d) Account suspension for addressing gender-related issues. Recognizing a middle-class focus of Chinese digital feminism, often exclusive to individuals with high levels of education and media literacy (Zeng 2020), we tried to enhance the diversity of interviewees by recruiting them from diverse educational backgrounds, regions, and gender orientations. After posting recruitment information on Wechat Moments and Weibo, 20 individuals contacted us, and 11 qualified participants were vetted out for interviews. Interviews were conducted in Chinese in December 2022 using a semi-structured script drawn from our initial observation. The topic list was structured into four sections: (a) Everyday use of Weibo; (b) Experience, behavior, and reflection during and after the account bombing; (c) Perspectives on the platform censorship system; (d) Feminist practices before and after account suspension.

Ethical considerations are paramount in our study. Participants were asked to provide informed consent before the interview and all the statements are approved to be quoted. Considering ethical implications in feminist data studies (Koen Leurs 2017) and the harm and vulnerability of being digital feminists, we followed the Ethics of Care in feminist research ethics (Aline Shakthi Franzke 2020). We chose not to collect personal or identifying data such as their Weibo account names as it is not needed for our research. Additionally, we anonymized all private information disclosed during interviews and blurred out the identifiable details of specific social events that caused the suspension. These precautions were implemented to ensure that all materials present in our study remain untraceable. This research has received approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee.

Each interview lasted between 45 min to 90 min and was recorded by the authors. We transcribed, coded and conducted a thematic analysis (Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke 2006) of the interview transcripts using NVivo, a software for qualitative data analysis. By compiling and analyzing emerging themes, we structure the foundation of our empirical findings as follows.

Results and discussions

Although there are chances of “rebirth” by creating another account on Weibo for the suspended users, in this study, we take the first “death” as an important node, as it makes a shift to a ghostly status and the development of haunting strategies. The reasons for this designation are mainly two-fold:

For most participants, the initial “death” on Weibo is devastating. Their first account, lasting for 5 to 10 years, is an indispensable digital archive for personal lives, “having a lot of memories, eyesights, and personal connections (Participant 5).” After their first “death,” they no longer use Weibo to share their private lives, but take it more as a site with political significance to follow public events and debates. In this context, the “rebirth” as a strategy of reappearing, is also one of the ghostly consequences of their first “death.”

“Many times, I might just be observing:” ghostly gaze, reflectivity, and visibility-manipulation

This section shows how the suspended feminists surviving as cyber living ghosts, hover between visible and invisible, presence and absence to establish new understandings and strategies. Specifically, they appropriate the (enforced) socially invisible status to wield a gaze-back power in the shadows and begin to realize the possible traps brought by the high visibility of gender issues. If there is still a necessity to speak, they tend to manage the visibility by controlling which aspects should be observed and by whom.

The spectral metaphor is first adopted by the interviewees themselves. One term “Cyber ghosts” to describe an account status after being “bombed out:”

By saying “Cyber,” I refer to an environment of high-tech, but where the quality of human life is very low. We have the Internet. It’s colorful. But we’re such fleeting lives on the Internet… By saying “Ghost,” I mean that I still have my consciousness. I can still click on someone else’s page. But I can’t be seen. Well, this may be the ghost. (Participant 4)

The statement points to a situation where the suspended account remains logged in, but it neither could be used to participate in any online activities nor be seen by any other users, which directly corresponds to a spectral status of being able to see others without being seen, a condition of being absent presence. This state reveals what Toni Morrison (1994, 378) argues “invisible things are not necessarily not-there,” and what appears absent can be a seething presence. Although deprived of the right to be present through speaking, the ghostly account still enables users to witness and follow up with the concerned:

I still check regularly to see if there is any update on the news that I was previously concerned about [before my death]. (Participant 7)

More critically, for some participants, the seemingly passive status of being voiceless and invisible instead facilitates practices of observation to enact a gaze back on the unfavorable online environment. As Derrida and Stiegler (2013, 41) argue, “the spectre enjoys the right of absolute inspection,” who can watch, observe, survey others, and establish new rules without being noticed. Participant 6 addresses the observation period as a self-reflection stage:

Many times I would just be observing and keeping a watchful eye on many things … To observe is to anchor my position. Looking at a lot of things enables me to know where my thoughts reside on a specific topic.

Embracing this role of an invisible observer, Participant 10 undergoes a more thorough inspection of Weibo contexts and stresses how observational practices keep one sober:

One thing I reflect on most is that all people are the results [the victims of the patriarchy], but during the activism on Weibo, I saw some of them tend to become the causes [the accomplice of the patriarchy] … To prevent this transition, is it better to have a buffer period to make people reflect on themselves before they speak? … For me, this is sparked and enabled by the inability of speaking after account-bombing.

The statement explicitly acknowledges the necessity of gazing back on the situation the activism is located in, where gender issues in Chinese digital space can always incite responses that may in turn discipline themselves or are used to attack each other. The invisible status, in this sense, could be utilized to wield a gaze-back power in the shadow to inspect the problems arising from the visible surroundings.

Meanwhile, the traps, problems, or futility brought by the high visibility of gender issues have been rendered obvious for most interviewees. Participant 10 acknowledges the trap associated with the commercialization of the platform in mobilizing feminism, referring to a pursuit of “the endless traffic and circulation of the content” on digital media to earn profits (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2018, 18):

I would say the boom of Weibo feminism is an illusory prosperity. It seems feminist opinions are always the top comments under any public issues… But many opinion leaders just appropriate feminist viewpoints to incite great public emotion and attract more views into their accounts to earn money.

Furthermore, hypervisibility is realized to be associated with heightened scrutiny and surveillance (Andrea Brighenti 2007). As participant 5 notices, what lies behind the boom of gender-related concerns on Weibo, is the prohibition from discussing institutional structure or current political scenario:

My suspended account, I think, is bombed out because I discussed the gender violence event with the country’s systematic problems… You’re not just calling out a specific local police station. You are discussing, in a derogatory way, the [top-level] structure and you would be bombed out.

In relation to this, one realizes the existing visible feminist voices are just expressed in a safe zone to circumvent censorship:

Are they [those whose feminists’ voice is still visible] really not aware of the core of the problems? Certainly not … It’s probably a strategy of self-protection.

Most of them do not vote for this filtered presence. Participant 11 points out they are not radical and critical enough to mobilize social changes:

Feminism should be discussed with political or institutional changes … But the current Weibo feminists seem to put the cart before the horse, hoping to force the country’s institutional change through these [allowed-to-be-visible] feminist ideas … which is unrealistic.

Pursuing Weibo’s high feminist visibility, in this sense, is revealed to be co-opted by neoliberalism or censored, making long-term activism disempowering and futile. If there is still a necessity to express, most ghostly feminists stay in a low-invisible status. One utilizes the platform mechanism to control who can see her opinions, “I would set the content to only friends or only myself visible” (Participant 1). Similarly, stop using tags and specifying certain events can be the other strategy:

I won’t use the tag … I just say what I feel and I’m not going to specify which event it is … Thus, if you are not in the same context with me, you would not know what I am talking about. (Participant 6)

Being present to speak is then no longer to promote feminist ideas visible to a larger audience but to record or seek resonance with the like-minded, while carefully managing visibility to balance completeness of ideas with censorship avoidance.

“Why should I comply with unreasonable platform rules:” the undying practices of negation

The suspended feminists as cyber living ghosts explore an alternative feminist politics that derives not from a doing but from an undoing, not from a continuation but from the disruption of lineage (Jack Halberstam 2011). The section illustrates how negation as a haunting practice is strategically utilized by these feminists as a refusal to be disciplined by the censorship mechanism. We suggest that their spectral agency lies in radical passivity (Halberstam 2011) towards surveillance and active refusal of negotiation with the platform.

Suicide, that is, committing an act that will result in a ban, is undertaken as a radical form of self-destruction to demonstrate the absurdity and coercion of Weibo’s regulation. Participant 5, for example, changes his profile images to a sensitive role with the awareness that doing so would result in a suspension:

[The reason why] my alternative account and my second alternative account [were bombed out] is very clear. It is actually suicide.

Two hours and three hours later, respectively, both his accounts are bombed out. Prior to this, his first account had already been banned; according to his observation, it was involved in gender issues with sensitive political implications. Despite knowing that using more obscure expressions would make the account safer and less susceptible to scrutiny after experiencing the first suspension, he refuses such self-comprise and explains his motivation to conduct this self-destructive action:

On the one hand, I want to know if it is true [that I will be banned if I just change my profile picture]. If the platform is going to block this, I have nothing to say. I will simply stop using it. On the other hand, you can also know, what is the degree of censorship in this nation, and what is our current digital speech environment.

The radical suicide of Participant 5 is a haunting practice in his spectral status. Haunting here, can be considered as both a metaphorical construct and an embodied reality in relation to his ghostly presence. It recognizes the authenticity and autonomy of the bombed living ghosts, and in the meantime, it uses the metaphor of ghost to capture or create “a sense of the imminently important, present, and disruptive” (Michael O’Riley 2007, 1) to negate the “unreasonable” platform rules and current censor environment.

Unsubscription, in addition, is another form of radical passivity towards the platform surveillance. Here, radical passivity can be understood as active withdrawal (Stephen Webb 2019). Specifically, participant 8 initiates the termination of her two Weibo accounts because after commenting on feminist-related issues, her homepage indicated that “The account status is abnormal. Please log in again.” For verification purposes, she is required to provide her name, email address, and other private information every time she wants to retweet, remark, or post. In addition, she tells us there is still a 10-day wait for the platform to be reviewed after an application for the unsubscription request. She thinks it is a “process of pulling on each other:”

[Weibo] enjoys a prominent position among other social media platforms and is waiting for me to change my mind … It wants me to regret closing my account.

Despite this, participant 8 determinedly chooses to close her accounts:

[The platform] doesn’t respect me at all… It prevents me from speaking and wants me to admit my mistake. How could this be?… If it doesn’t let me use it, I don’t need it anymore.

This reveals the extremely unbalanced power relations between the platform and users, wherein not only the platform restricted users’ freedom of expression, but technological affordances compelled users to self-censor. In this context, the refuser uses unsubscription as a type of “playing dead” through “calculated passivity” (Erica Weiss 2016, 352), to avoid the hazards of platform regulation. This haunting as a form of withdrawal that remains in place, foregrounding an emphasis on survival (Elliott Prasse-Freeman 2022), can be viewed as a means of articulating agency and resistance to the structure of domination that, even after restrictions, still holds a tight grip on their perceived opportunity to resist.

Moreover, participants conduct a series of active refusals after the suspension. Some refuse to complain since they realize it will not work. Participants 4 and 11 mention that they are well aware that the content they post are sensitive, and they are at a disadvantage in terms of platform regulations. However, they emphasize that this consciousness does not mean that they accept the rules of Weibo, but they have anticipated the failure of the complaint.

Simultaneously, after the account is blocked, many participants decline to register a new one for two reasons. On one hand, reestablishing an online identity and refollowing the bloggers that have followed before is a manual process, requiring time and effort; on the other hand, new accounts on Weibo will be subject to new restrictions. For instance, Participant 8 shares that frequently following other users might be considered abnormal and required to enter a verification code multiple times. Participants, therefore, refuse to continue using Weibo. “It is the larger online environment of surveillance and misogyny on Weibo that makes people more likely to leave the platform” (Participants 5 and 11). Refusal, in this sense, can be understood as reflexive and strategic negation, indicating the inevitability and non-negotiability of the harsh repression of feminists by the platform regulation and the authoritarian regimes behind it. It is an autonomous, interpretive, and cognitive, divergent process, implicitly intertwined with resistance, and it identifies the disavowals, rejections, and manoeuvring with and away from indirect forms of governmentality (Prasse-Freeman 2022).

Indeed, suicide, unsubscription, and refusal are not ethical abdications, but rather, are negation, potential barrier, and disruptive factors to engage in the platform’s hegemonic conspiracy. These manifestations are not simply passive withdrawal or retreat but rather, active forms of radically alternative modes of being and doing. This is in line with shadow feminism, that responds to oppressive patriarchy with shady, vague patterns of destruction, unbecoming and violating, creating a counterintuitive and seemingly completely passive way to resist patriarchal power (Halberstam 2011). The haunting practices point to ghostly selfhood that refuses survivability and continuity, and instead uses its already bombed status as a battlefield to draw out the impulse of platform’s authoritarian patriarchy to repress digital feminists. Through being censored and radical passivity, the suspended feminists use their own deaths to reveal the violence of oppressive censorship. In other words, their haunting as cyber living ghosts, are not a declaration of death or failure but as the negation of that which negates us (Christian Garland 2013).

“Shifting the battleground:” ghostly wanderings beyond Weibo

This section examines how the ambivalence of spatialities infiltrate through narratives of hauntings in the quotidian. As cyber living ghosts, participants do not solely rely on Weibo. Instead, they choose some other channels and wander across various social platforms in shifting more complementary “battlegrounds” for survival and expression. WeChat, for instance, as a relatively private social media, featuring instant messaging and social feeds, serves as a confidential space for participants’ expressions and discussions. Some participants will re-connect with their Weibo friends on WeChat after their suspensions:

Because [speaking on] Weibo is a bit dangerous; we then form a WeChat group to share our views. (Participant 7)

WeChat group, compared by Participant 4 as an “online dormitory,” is used for compatible feminists to discuss political events and build their community. Additionally, WeChat Moments, a semi-closed networking function inbuilt in WeChat, has become a place for them to vent and express themselves. Participant 2 shares that she adds WeChat contact with many of her Weibo followers after the closure of her account: “I switch to be insane in my WeChat Moments.” Their sense of expression and engagement in feminist issues is not diminished by the suspension. Rather, retreating into a private space allows them to maintain privacy, build community, and seek peer support (Keller Jessalynn 2019).

Douban, is another social networking platform participants chose to relocate to. The openness of Douban as a forum and the anonymity of participating in discussions give users a relatively unfettered space to engage with. In this sense, it is no surprise that it has become a “paradise,” for many feminists who have been blocked by Weibo, as Participant 4 shares. But participants also mention that despite Douban being the place where they learned and observed most feminist-related issues, they do not want to post content frequently. Participant 9 explains,

Douban, or some podcast media sites, is more of a way for me to absorb [information].

Moreover, the extensive censorship in the domestic Internet motivates these participants to transcend media platforms outside the Great Firewall of China. Twitter and Mastodon, which are more open and diversified, providing more opportunities for peer interactions, are the most frequently mentioned alternatives to Weibo among participants. However, breaching the Firewall requires a Virtual Private Network (VPN) server, which is illegal in China and unstable in operation. Feminists have to face the potential legal risks and spend more effort and money in order to use international platforms.

In addition, they view their cross-media practices (Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp 2017) on other platforms outside the firewall are in some sense a “forced migration.” Participant 5, for example, who uses Mastodon, Instagram, and Telegram regularly, says:

After my Weibo account shuts down, the platform’s importance to me diminishes significantly. Weibo has lost its initial meaning where I cannot self-talk or discuss public issues … However, because I am “politically” transferred, I am obliged to move to platforms outside the firewall, these platforms are more politicalized … You feel like you are on this platform more often to discuss political or social issues.

Indeed, for these participants, posts on Twitter and Mastodon are decentralized, rational, as well as elitist:

People care about a lot of topics, and it might be difficult for me to feel related on these platforms. (Participant 6)

The sense of closure and isolation, to some extent, reflects the irreplaceability of Weibo for domestic digital feminists, where they possess a multi-faceted sense of belonging. Social media platforms in China are complementary rather than exclusive, and Weibo is indispensable for most participants to discuss social affairs. Besides, the topic-oriented affordance of Weibo enables public debate to be more concentrated and dependent:

You can see everyone is discussing what you are talking about and thinking about, which will give you a “strange” sense of belonging. (Participant 6)

Likewise, the suspended feminists diverge and converge as cyber living ghosts, and being censored as a collective experience creates a contextualized sense of belonging on this platform (Couldry and Hepp 2017).

Polymedia (Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller 2012) as a communicative environment enables cyber living ghosts’ virtual mobility between different platforms, inside and outside firewalls. Their virtual traces of hauntings are tremendously empowering, offering them the flexibility to mobilize and expand the boundaries of online feminist movements, during which they are self-navigated in emission, self-generated in content, and self-reflective in identities.

In the meantime, the world multiple manifests different dimensions and stages of the world. It engenders polyvalent worlding practices that enable multiplicities within and beyond the dominant discourse and can transcend divergent spatialities and temporalities (Omura Keiichi, Grant Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka and Morita Atsuro 2020). Haunting can be understood as a worlding practice, during which feminists as cyber living ghosts can participate in incommensurable worlds simultaneously. By harnessing the transformative potential of digital experiences, they are able to shape their identities, embody their ideals, and gain new insights that inform their engagement in their physical lives (Trend 2016).

Participants agree that the spectrality endowed after account bombing makes them gain more impact and resilience in offline quotidian practices. Participant 11, as a middle school teacher, mentions that after quitting Weibo, she acquires a higher sense of worth through her daily teaching practices, during which she puts more efforts into guiding students to think about and recognize the unequal power structure:

I abandon Weibo because I [feel like] I have no influence on the platform … What I could do offline is what really matters.

Participants 7, 9, and 10 acknowledge that paying less attention on Weibo, they would like to demonstrate a feminist stance in their daily lives and destigmatize feminism among their peers, suggesting the blurring of online-offline duality. In particular, upset by the account suspension, participant 7 highlights how a sense of healing and resilience can be gained from the quotidian practices of self-transformation offline:

[I acquire resilience] from myself. I would like to improve myself [with feminist notions] via my daily actions. And if I have enough capability, [I will] continue changing others.

Likewise, participating in the anti-sanitary pad shaming campaign (Participant 9), joining a feminist reading group (Participant 7), creating feminist literature (Participant 11), etc., are instances of fragmented quotidian moments that facilitate an alternative social geography where the act of haunting undergirds the present and anticipates the future (Peter Buse and Andrew Stott 1999). In this regard, haunting in the physical space as a quotidian worlding practice (Michael Fiddler 2019), indicates a continuity of these bombed feminists seeking for justices against digital patriarchy authoritarianism through everyday change making (Henrik Bang and Sørensen Eva 1999).

The spectral feminists traversing hybrid places to haunt is thus found in their cross-platform engagements as well as physically embodied practices, which undo and contest the patriarchal platform censorship system and authoritarian regimes. Individual identities are formed on this basis through worlding practices, and once developed, these identities unfold and generate new spaces wherein new relationships and politics of knowledge production are fostered (Trend 2016).

Conclusion

As Söderlund Jonas and Elisabeth Borg (2018, 897) suggest, referencing a liminal form of being helps to “question taken-for-granted facts and to explore new realities with a more open and ‘alternative’ mindset.” While the challenges posed by censorship are evident, the study suggests that Chinese feminists, in their liminal and ghostly existence, find ways to navigate and resist. This article is the first exploratory empirical study to investigate the suspended feminists from their embodied experiences rather than event-based activism (e.g., Han and Lee 2018). Their haunting practices enable the formation of in-betweenness in terms of (dis)embodiment, position, and space, particularly shifting from visible to invisible, from passive negotiation to active refusal, and from a single platform to hybrid spaces.

The cultivation of ambiguous multiplicities among these feminists not only serves as a response to the challenges posed by censorship but also unveils a spectrum of generative opportunities that redefine the landscape of feminist activism in the contemporary Chinese context. The deliberate embrace of ambiguity allows Chinese feminists to develop innovative strategies, hybrid activism, and alternative narratives that go beyond conventional forms of resistance. The incomplete bodies, withdrawing positions, and scattered spaces of the feminists, traditionally seen as signaling the failures of movements, are endowed with new transformative understandings and serve as sites for developing creative, non-linear, and multi-agential tactics. The dynamic blending of online and offline strategies, visible and invisible actions, and a strategic oscillation between platforms, allows Chinese feminists to maneuver through the ever-shifting terrain of digital spaces while retaining a presence that extends beyond the limitations imposed by platform censorship. The creation of this hybrid activism out of spectral agency not only safeguards the continuity of feminist narratives but also fosters resilience in the face of adversities. The study, in this sense, adds to the literature on the political potential of spectral subjectivities in a non-Anglo-American context, taking China as a method (Kuan-Hsing Chen 2010).

The spectralization of digital feminists thus encompasses a paradigm shift in the approach of Chinese feminists’ world-making from singular, straightforward methods to a more versatile, nuanced, and hybrid approach, and a commitment to innovation, adaptability, and resilience. This involves the negation of a single totalizing world (Keiichi et al. 2020) and the creation of alternatives to self-governance and self-navigation (Rico Self and Ashley Hall 2021) in an uncanny world of multi-agential complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability beyond existing taxonomies. By doing so, a more inclusive portrayal of feminist struggles can be created, contributing to a richer understanding of their activism.

The study has some limitations, paving the way for further investigation. First, the study has limited space to examine the concept of the body concerning the experiences of these digitally banned feminists. Future studies can theoretically delve into the incorporeal digital bodies of the suspended Chinese Internet users, and their implication for cyberfeminism, corporeal feminism, and new material feminism. Second, the study lacks a temporal exploration of these ghostly feminists in mobilizing collective forces. The following research could investigate whether and to what extent these shadowy practices accumulate a collective force with potential future influence. Furthermore, as an exploratory study, our research does not provide a comprehensive overview of feminists’ account-bombing experiences in the digital landscape. Subsequent studies could collect data from a broader and more diverse sample of account-beings subject to platform censorship, thereby providing a more nuanced and holistic understanding of the strategies and impacts of digital feminist activism under restrictive online environments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editors Mia Liinason and Ov Cristian Norocel, and anonymous reviewers for the constructive comments. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge comments by Koen Leurs, Qian Huang, Zhen Ye, Shangwei Wu, and Yongjian Li on previous drafts. Finally, this article is dedicated to our research participants and all the haunting ghosts.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shao Shao

Shao Shao is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her doctoral research aims to unpack the controversial surge of attention to a gendered rural world on Chinese social media. Her research interests include gender, media, and rural studies.

Guanqin He

Guanqin He is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry ICON, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Utrecht University. She is currently conducting her CSC-funded project Digital Crossroads in China: Chinese Women Negotiating Migration, Urbanization, and Digitization, focusing on the intersection of gig workers, gender, migration, and digital media. Her research interests include gender, social media, migration, and cultural studies.