Censorship as Dignity Takings: "De-platformed" Users’ Personal Loss in Social Media Suspensions

Social media suspensions, often known as “de-platforming” in the English-speaking world, are a common form of internet censorship that excludes certain types of user-generated content and marginalizes the suspended users. Moving beyond the publicness-oriented perspective in Internet censorship studies, this study directs attention to censorship’s consequences for users’ personal lives. We examine social media suspensions in China, which Chinese netizens call “account bombing,” and focus on the loss of the “victims.” Notably, people commonly use social media accounts as personal archives that store their digital traces, from which they obtain a sense of self, and perceive the accounts as their private property. We use the dignity takings theory to illustrate the dual harm the victims suffer in account bombing: Censorship deprives them of both their social media accounts and dignity. We propose the concept of “dual dehumanization” to explain the dignity violation in account bombing, as this arbitrary conduct not only occurs in a dehumanizing manner, but also destroys users’ identity work and community ties. Account bombing often makes the victims realize the vulnerability of social media accounts, prompting them to change their usage behavior to circumvent losing their digital traces in the future. Their measures prominently include timely data backup and self-censorship of their online speeches.