Proactive governance by official administrators on Chinese social media platforms: Boundary discourse and governance legitimacy

Chinese social media platforms are taking the initiative to cultivate relationships with both the government and users by proactively elaborating on platform rules, aiming to enhance the legitimacy of governance. This article seeks to understand the proactive governance of Chinese social media platforms and the underlying power dynamics by analyzing how official administrators construct governance legitimacy through boundary discourse. We conduct a critical discourse analysis of video texts published by official administrators on three large social media platforms: Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili. It is found that official administrators legitimize platform governance by shaping three types of boundary discourse: deviant expulsion, traffic rewards, and community pest clean-up. Proactive governance by official administrators represents efforts by social platforms to balance top-down regulatory pressures with the autonomy of platform governance and to seek ways to legitimize the governance framework in a manner that is more acceptable to users. Going beyond a technology-centric concept of platform governance, the article seeks to understand the governance system of Chinese social platforms through the boundary discourse of official administrators.