Platform Moderation and Governing Imperatives: The Selective Visibility of ‘Rightful Resistance’ on Douyin in China

This article examines how selective visibility operates in China’s short-video platform moderation environment. It examines 100 online real-name petitioning videos publicly visible on Douyin collected on three dates in 2024 and 2025. It conceptualises online real-name petitioning as a digitally mediated form of rightful resistance and examines the relationship between the material that is allowed to remain visible and the imperatives of platform moderation and broader governance.The findings show that 60 percent of Douyin petitioners reported turning online after encountering difficulties in offline institutional channels. Within the corpus of ‘visible’ videos, references to intra-state divisions are widespread, taking both vertical – centre–local – and horizontal – inter-agency – forms. References to laws or official state discourse are more common than mobilisation cues, while corruption constitutes the largest issue category. These patterns are consistent with moderation policies which favour the visibility of system-affirming, oversight-oriented grievances over content suggestive of collective action. Follow-up analysis identifies publicly identifiable institutional responses in 38 percent of cases, but many of these responses were not followed by a publicly traceable final outcome, and most allegations remained unverifiable. The article argues that on China’s Douyin platform, governing imperatives, operating through both state regulation and platform moderation, structure the boundaries of publicly visible rightful resistance.