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.