Behind the Screeners: The Surveillant Assemblage in a Chinese Live-Streaming Platform

In her 2019 ground-breaking monograph Behind the Screen, Roberts highlights the emotional distress endured by lowly paid commercial content moderators. While these moderators censor according to platform rules, it remains unclear who determines these rules. Who watches these watchers? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a major Chinese live-streaming platform, we envision platform censorship as a surveillant assemblage of state actors, platform algorithm-auditors, and end-users (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Organized internally as a chain that branches out and merges back at various points, the auditors have security as their top priority. Here, “security” not only means aligning platform contents with state laws. Auditors have direct contact only with colleagues immediately above or below them in the surveillance chain. With responsibilities often overlapping between departments that compete for platform funding and support, “security” also means keeping one’s work secret from rivals. Hence, this study illuminates how platform algorithm-auditors critically shape content visibility.