The manufacturing of (Un)stability: Possible but improbable stability in long-term content moderation on Chinese social media platforms

Abstract

This article examines how content moderation, often framed as precarious and invisible labor, has become a relatively stable occupation for many workers in China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and 21 semi-structured interviews, we conceptualize this condition as the manufacturing of (un)stability, a “possible but improbable” stability that is institutionally produced yet conditional and reversible amid technological, organizational, and political volatility. Our findings show that stability is not a linear shift from precarity to formality, but a governed outcome shaped by workers’ adaptive strategies, rapid role formalization and stratification, and the integration of human judgment with automated systems. Embedded in digital governance mandates aligning platform rationalities with political priorities, moderation stabilizes employment for some while deepening labor’s infrastructural role in managing information risk. This study offers a non-Western account that complicates binaries of precarity and formality and reframes stability as a politically and organizationally manufactured condition.

Keywords

China content moderation content moderator platform governance platform labor stability

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