Protecting Society from Itself: Justifying Social Credit on Chinese Social Media

Author(s)

H. Christoph Steinhardt, Christian Göbel

Abstract

States seek to expand their infrastructural power by extracting more information from society, but surveillance often raises critical questions about privacy and control. To persuade populations that collecting information is in their best interest, officials often invoke the logic of a privacy-security tradeoff. This study investigates how surveillance is justified, and how citizens engage with these justifications, by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing social media discourse about China’s Social Credit System Project (SCSP)—an information collection and behavior steering infrastructure. Drawing on a stratified random sample of over 1,500 hand-coded messages out of almost 72,500 posts on the social media platform Sina Weibo between 2014 and 2021, the study reveals a dominant justification narrative that portrays surveillance as a solution to the threat of allegedly pervasive normlessness in society. State-affiliated accounts often pushed social anomie frames by piggybacking on incidents involving transgressions of integrity and civility. Anomie frames highlighting punishment and fraud elicited systematically higher user engagement and private accounts also amplified this framing to a certain extent. Surveillance-critical frames about privacy and control were scarce. Systematic post-publication censorship does not account for this scarcity, but anecdotal evidence suggests that some critical content had been deleted when it gained traction. Thus, within the state-curated social media sphere, the Chinese state enjoyed some success in advancing the argument that state penetration needs to be intensified, to protect society from itself.

Organisation(s)

Department of East Asian Studies

Journal

Big Data & Society

ISSN

2053-9517

Publication date

11-2025

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

506002 E-government, 504019 Media sociology, 602045 Sinology

Keywords

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/9a24665d-a2eb-45cd-8d06-57734b67d559