Hello everyone, my name is Yichao Cui.
In this video, I m going to share our work on Chinese lesbian and bisexual women s online
communities on Weibo.
During this presentation, I will talk about the study design and important findings.
Our work explores challenges that Chinese lesbian and bisexual women face when initiating,
growing, and sustaining such communities.
Specifically, we focus on their online communities on Weibo.
This is because Weibo is a leading micro-blogging website, and it s one of the largest social
networking sites used by the Chinese LGBT+ population.
Based on prior research, Chinese lesbian and bisexual women in particular use Weibo to
share information relevant to their identities, facilitate discussions, and connect with other
lesbian and bisexual female users.
Chinese lesian and bisexual women still experience stigma and isolation due to collectivist culture
and censorship.
However, how Chinese online communities for lesbian and bisexual women confront and mitigate
the challenges of a broadly hostile online environment remains largely unexplored.
Existing research focuses on challenges that Western LGBT+ people have when they build
and maintain online communities.
For example, it is still not easy for social-media platforms to protect various aspects of their
users safety and privacy, since the platforms lack effective mechanisms to partition their
friendship networks into those who know they are LGBT+ and those who do not.
There might also exist harassment by outsiders, such as heterosexual males and females who
use fake accounts to infiltrate LGBT+ online communities and spread hate speech inside
them.
Insider harm is another challenge, which is committed by members of the same group and
involves stigmatization, invalidation, and erasure targeted at other users.
Apart from these, censorship on social-media platforms may block LGBT+ people s exchange
of social support and hamper the process of their building of online communities.
Research has indicated that Western LGBT+ research findings are not congruent with Asian
reality, in particular when it comes to people s online community-building practices.
Therefore, there's a need to understand Chinese lesbian and bisexual women's online communities
in order to make social-media platforms more inclusive for LGBT+ online communities in
non-Western cultural contexts.
In this study, we hope to understand Chinese lesbian and bisexual women's needs and behavior
in building online communities.
We also want to provide insight into how to design social media in order to make them
become more inclusive for LGBT+ and other stigmatized populations.
There are mainly three research questions to guide our study.
The first question is, how and why have lesbian and bisexual women initiated online communities
on Weibo?
The second question is, what have been lesbian and bisexual women's challenges to growing
those online communities?
The last one is, what have been lesbian and bisexual women's challenges to sustaining
those online communities?
In our study, we first reached out to 4 lesbian bloggers on Weibo and asked them if they want
to participate in the study and whether they are willing to invite more members from their
own online communities.
We successfully recruited 4 bloggers and 36 members in total.
24 of them are lesbian women and 16 are bisexual women.
Now let's take a look at our results.
We found that the bloggers' community-building were largely unintentional.
They were motivated to build online communities because they felt a strong obligation to speak
for the wider Chinese LGBT+ women s community.
As one blogger said, "Lesbian and bisexual women lack space to exchange ideas and speak
up for ourselves.
So, it is necessary to build more online communities that gather lesbian and bisexual women and
allow us to communicate freely."
We also found that bloggers facilitated mutual support within their communities, encouraged
members to learn from others identity-related experiences, and strove to make their blogs
members feel cared for by the community.
For example, bloggers published posts on members' behalf to discuss certain information, helped
members form offline relationships, and communicated directly with members via private messages.
It should be noted that these bloggers also adopted collaborative efforts with members
to deal with outsiders' infiltration.
For example, if outsiders engaged in harmful behaviors, such as harassing members or leaving
discriminatory comments, the bloggers disclosed these malicious actors account information
in their blogs, to alert all members and prevent them from being harmed.
As B2 mentioned, "The most important benefit of publicizing the person s account is that,
at least in my blog, people will avoid this person, unless they change all their profile
information or use other accounts.
But generally, I publicize outsiders accounts to increase their costs of joining and participating
in my community."
We observed that instead of blocking or blacklisting those who posted inflammatory comments, bloggers
would respond to the members comments and guide the discussions; however, bloggers could
not entirely avoid being misunderstood and targeted by their members.
As B3 said, "If I directly reply to a member by saying that I don t agree with her, she
may be cyberbullied by many other members [...] no matter how well I elaborate my thoughts,
and how thoroughly I discuss the nuances of certain topics, there are always some people
who misinterpret my ideas and cyberbully me because their own perspectives are different."
Lastly, we found that bloggers adopted various strategies for avoiding the attention of censorship
algorithms, ranging from verbal techniques like using homophones of sensitive words,
puns, coded language, and splitting Chinese characters, to uploading photos that contained
text.
As B1 mentioned, "Before posting photos that I think might get blocked, I usually edit
them by adding several strokes to them.
Sometimes it really helps photos survive automatic detection."
The takeaways of this study include, enhance privacy settings by allowing members to display
their data based on networks, set up invite-only communities or membership-approval mechanisms,
detect malicious accounts' behaviors, and develop tools that can not only perform automatic
tasks in moderation, but also have empathetic responses.
This is the end of this presentation.
Thank you all for listening!