Doing Ethnography on Social Media: A Methodological Reflection on the Study of Online Groups in China, Di Wang and Sida Liu

Wang and Liu reflect on online ethnography, which formed the core of their data for the related article on Chinese feminists' and activist lawyers' artivism (Legal Mobilization, Chapter 5).

In the increasingly digitalized world of the early 21st century, online groups and cyberspace are co-constituted with multiple mediums and complex inter­connectivity among users and groups. This makes it even harder for research­ers to set a spatial and/or a temporal boundary on her research subjects. In addition, ethnographers sometimes raise concerns of the reliability and valid­ity of social media data. As social media change the nature of people's communication, how sustainable is a researcher-informant relationship built online and how reliable is a person's online profile for predicting her offline actions? How should a researcher crosscheck and analyze an online discussion with a face-to-face discussion? Finally, how would digitalized communication brought by social media affect the researcher-informant power dynamics, as now informants have greater capability to access and respond to a researcher's findings through the internet? Methodological reflections on the challenges and opportunities of online ethnography remain scarce, particularly in authoritarian contexts. It remains an open question how qualitative inquiry can resist the lure of Big Data and provide alternative approaches to make effective use of social media in social science.

Living Online, Living Onsite: Access and Ethics of Online Ethnography

Online ethnography is qualitatively different from aimless online browsing, but its beginning is often similar to accessing any website or social media platform. Ethnographic immersion for social scientists involves observing other people as they respond to social interaction, as well as experiencing the events and interactions oneself. Thus, the researcher must spend a sub­stantial amount of time on the site on a regular (often daily) basis and familiarize herself with its users and discourses. This process of online ethno­graphic immersion is crucial for developing the researcher's identity in the online group and getting access to potential informants. It resembles trad­itional ethnographic immersion in many ways, yet there are also notable differences. In this section, we use our own fieldwork experiences to discuss the issues of access and ethics in “living online.”

The first author started to observe feminist online actions in China since 2012 and then to participate in some actions since 2013. Through active daily interactions on different social media platforms, her participation as a com­menter led her to a chatroom of @FeministVoices (nuquan zhi sheng), a Weibo account established by the Media Monitor for Women Network (MMWN) in 2010. @FeministVoices was the largest grassroots feminist media outlet in China with 181,019 followers when it was forcibly shut down on March 8, 2018, the International Women's Day. Because of the time differ­ence between China and the United States (where the first author was based), she altered her daily schedule to maximize interactions with Chinese femi­nists in the chatroom, from staying up late at night to checking hundreds of messages every morning. As a result, she was able to form close connections with many activists in chatrooms before her first field trip in China in 2014. The following is her story of how an online chatroom became a network of informants:

In the summer of 2013, a Chinese feminist activist I met on Weibo added me to a QQ chatroom for @FeministVoices readers, right around the time when the U.S.

The second author's first encounter with online lawyer activism echoes the first author's account above. As a graduate student interested in studying the Chinese legal profession, he began to regularly visit the All-China Lawyers Association's (ACLA) online forum in 2003, shortly after the forum opened on the ACLA's official website. After actively participating in the forum discus­sions using a pseudonym for about a year, he became the board manager of one of its discussion boards, “Jurisprudence and Constitutionalism” (fali xianzheng). This new role gave him access to not only regular discussions but also the forum's recycle bin, which contained the deleted messages, including many politically sensitive ones. [...]

As our early field experiences suggest, social media, be it a chatroom or a forum, can provide a researcher instant access to the social networks of potential informants, as well as details about their demographic information and political views.

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Although Big Data scientists are usually invisible to their research subjects, online ethnographers are visible and accessible to their informants once they are connected on social media platforms. Consequently, when studying feminist or lawyer activists, social connections and networks are leverages for both researchers and activists. On one hand, researchers can observe more complex dynamics and narratives of the movement through accessing activists' social networks. Snowballing often gets easier through online social networks than in traditional offline fieldwork. On the other hand, when activists mobilize their social connections for collective action, they can also access the researchers' networks for resource mobilization. This reciprocal nature of their interaction complicates another classic question for ethnographers - to what extent should you “go native” and become one of them? Both authors faced this question repeatedly in their online fieldwork over the years, which is further complicated by the risky and unpredictable nature of political mobil­ization in the authoritarian context of China.

In traditional ethnography, the in-group and outgroup boundaries are relatively clear. On the contrary, online ethnography can often give the researcher instant access to group membership, but it can also generate an identity crisis. Once a member of a social media group, it is no longer possible to completely retreat to the seemingly objective standpoint of a social science researcher, at least on the frontstage of online interaction. Even after the fieldwork is completed, group membership and solidarity remain, unless the researcher withdraws herself from the social media platform. Some research­ers use multiple Facebook or WeChat accounts to separate the identity in the field and the identity in the ivory tower, but this is not always convenient or even feasible. More often, online ethnographers struggle with this question in the whole research process and make decisions on a case-by-case basis. [...]

The second author's encounter with this reflexive question has an add­itional layer of complexity. Although he is not a licensed lawyer and thus cannot directly participate in legal cases as the first author did in feminist actions, over the years he has accumulated a reputation as a scholar who studies and writes about the Chinese legal profession. Consequently, his lawyer informants sometimes would approach him to seek his voice as a public intellectual in support of their activism. He gave the following account of how he dealt with such requests:

Scholars like me who study politically sensitive topics in China like lawyers and human rights have to walk a fine line between an objective social scientist and a visible public intellectual. For example, in 2012 or 2013, a notable human rights activist in Beijing (who was detained later during the 709 Crackdown on activist lawyers in July 2015) sent me a private message on Weibo and asked if I would be interested in meeting with him and discussing possible collaboration. It put me in a real dilemma because, while I very much would like to help him, an in-person meeting with him might put both of us in trouble with the state security agents.

What the second author described above is not only an issue of self­censorship in an authoritarian context, but also the difficult personal struggle of a social scientist who deeply cares about his research subjects yet constantly feels the limit of his own capacity in supporting them in their everyday practice. This leads to a second question: “What would you do if you could not become one of them?” Arguably, researchers can use their scholarly writings to expose the problems and risks that activists face from the authori­tarian state. For instance, the second author's book on Chinese criminal defense lawyers (Liu and Halliday, 2016) is considered “an act of solidarity” for activist lawyers by one of its reviewers, though as a piece of scholarly work it still maintains a disciplined distance required by the objectivity of social science writing.

But researchers can certainly do more than scholarly writing and publish­ing, especially in the age of social media. Posting on public platforms like Twitter and Weibo or semi-private platforms like Instagram and WeChat is often an effective means to assist activists in their collective action. In the authoritarian context of China, such posts require a combination of courage and delicacy, and it is ultimately the personal choice of every researcher on the best way to handle it. Both authors have written many online posts and essays to support their research subjects over the years, but they have also refrained from doing so in many challenging situations. [...]

Nevertheless, having personal experiences as an insider does not guarantee that a researcher would produce the best theory about the community of interest or beyond. The art of doing social science requires the researcher to find her best position to observe and participate in the online community as well as a particular writing style to tell the story. The fragmented and often unbounded nature of social media interactions raises ethical questions of

3⁸¹ confidentiality and accuracy in representing each informant's stories. On one hand, the pain and pleasure of sharing personal details characterizes social media interactions, which can help ethnographers understand their inform­ants from multiple aspects and through crisscrossing boundaries. For example, a researcher may share membership with an informant in one chatroom for a rescue campaign for a detained activist lawyer, as well as another chatroom for lesbian parents of rescued cats. On the other hand, when online activities over time are intentionally collected and documented, a researcher can have a detailed profile of an informant's life, which can be consequential for this informant's privacy and safety. To be sure, one of the most compelling components of qualitative research is telling stories, especially ones with vivid details and characters. Although it is tempting to do so, a researcher should always consider the social and political consequences of her writings and strictly protect the informant's personal information according to the ethical requirements of social science research.

To deal with such ethical challenges, in the process of his data analysis and writing on activist lawyers, the second author often adopts an analytical way of storytelling, which integrates interviews, online observation, and other empir­ical evidence from multiple informants in different geographic locations to make one analytical point. This writing style allows him to fully protect the identities of informants while presenting a relatively comprehensive picture of their experiences. The following is an example that he gave on how to weave the online and offline data into a web of anonymized yet analytically inter­connected accounts:

When I interview lawyers, I always try to ask their biographies in detail, because I find the early life history of a lawyer not only fascinating in itself but also very helpful for understanding her law practice. A lawyer once told me, the reason he became a human rights activist was that his parents were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. When others helped their family in that difficult time, as a child his heart felt warm. So now he hopes to use his activism to warm the hearts of others. This kind of in-depth personal stories are hard to get from the fragmented interactions on social media. Some activist lawyers have a tough and courageous image online but, if you get to know them offline, you see a totally different side of them. They would play soccer with their children or make dumplings with their spouses. When I was writing my book, I seriously thought about presenting a few lawyers' life stories in a holistic fashion as case studies, because the stories were so powerful and the lawyers could speak for themselves, but then I quickly realized that it would not be possible to do that without revealing their identities. Finally, I decided to put their biographical accounts from interviews and the ethnography of their online interactions into different sections and chapters. Within each section, I used the similar or comparable experiences of several lawyers anonymously to make the same analytical point, say, how they were harassed by the state security or disbarred by the justice bureau. As a result, readers do not get the coherent life history of any of the lawyers I discussed in the book, but adding the analytical points together, they can still get a pretty good picture of what happened to them as a group. All the bits and pieces were reassembled in writing.

There are disadvantages of “reassembling the social” in this manner, how­ever. The beauty and liveliness of narratives are often lost in the pursuit of analytical rigor. To mitigate this problem, the second author uses extended quotes from interviews and online ethnography in his writings to give readers more original discourses from the informants. This method worked effectively in the earlier periods of online ethnography in China. This was because the most popular online platforms back then were online forums and Weibo, which were considered as in the public domain. However, the situation changed as WeChat replaced Weibo as the dominant form of online inter­actions in China in recent years and it has become more challenging to collect and make use of online ethnographic data. WeChat requires its users to register with a cellphone number, which is linked to one's national identity card number. Furthermore, WeChat also restricts its users from publicly searching posts outside one's existing contacts. This leads to the non­anonymous and semi-private nature of WeChat-based online interactions. Consequently, researching online groups at the WeChat era has increased not only the ethical burden of researchers but also the risks of surveillance from the state authorities. Although Weibo posts can be deleted, their public nature enables some evidence to be preserved in the public domain not only through any individual user's actions of screenshots and reposts but also through organized efforts such as FreeWeibo.com, which actively monitors and makes available censored Weibo content. In contrast, a WeChat discus­sion or even an entire WeChat group can be removed by the state censorship without generating much public awareness, because the semi-private inter­actions within the group had never entered the public domain.

Therefore, as state censorship forces social media interactions out of public spaces in China in recent years, it is even more important for a researcher to immerse in online groups and become a reflexive agent of memory of their “disappeared” stories. It also makes the combination of online and in-person interviews and observation a more effective and desirable methodology for collecting and preserving data. Otherwise, without taking into account “disappeared” information, using a Big Data algorithm or a set of keywords for data collection and analysis would be like typing a story on a keyboard with “an unknown set of keys disabled.”