Justice Interrupted: How Platformed Narrative Strictures Failed Chinese Domestic Violence Survivors’ Online Evidence Presentation

Existing studies indicate that digital technologies facilitate informal justice outside the state (Powell, 2015). Chinese domestic violence survivors, for example, leveraged platform affordances to seek visibility and validation through evidence presentation. Yet they found that they failed to bring about informal justice despite the fact that such narrative tactics align with prevailing legal standards on evidentiary fidelity and public expectations for vulnerable survivors. Why were these seemingly convincing narrative strategies counterproductive in the digital sphere?

Drawing on 38 formal and informal interviews with survivors, anti-DV workers, and platform moderators as well as participatory observation, this study shows how the interaction between platformed constraints imposed narrative strictures on survivors’ evidence presentation.

First, while survivors tried to present evidence of suffering, platforms’ business imperatives prompted them to suppress such content to make users upbeat and sustain their digital engagements. Specifically, by censoring “violence and negative content,” survivors who showed their physical and mental harm to elicit public sympathy were silenced for “violating community standards.”

Furthermore, as survivors attempted to disclose the details of domestic violence to lend veracity to their stories, platforms removed such evidence in the name of protecting user privacy. Indeed, abuse-referencing narratives, were removed automatically upon perpetrators’ reports under the platform’s enforcement of legal rules.

Lastly, when survivors exposed official documents to prove official misconduct, platforms—in accordance with state mandates—purposively aided state-engineered misinformation to discredit survivors and mislead the public through platforms' recommendation algorithms.

In all, platformed constraints—shaped by market demands, legal frameworks, and official policies—imposed narrative strictures that rendered survivors’ experiences invisible and ultimately thwarted their pursuit of informal justice.