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Studying WeChat Official Accounts with novel ‘backend-in’ and ‘traceback’ methods: Walking through platforms back-to-front and past-to-present

Version 2 2024-06-02, 14:22
Version 1 2022-04-08, 08:50
journal contribution
posted on 2022-03-16, 00:00 authored by Fan Yang, Luke HeemsbergenLuke Heemsbergen, David MarshallDavid Marshall
The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our ‘Backend-in method’ proposes to study platform governance in the meso – between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of platform use. The ‘Traceback method’ uses researcher-informant collaboration to document and reflect on the shifts of platform affordances that have reconfigured media practices, organisational structures, and economic incentives over time. We show how these methods proved useful in mapping Chinese-Australian media organisations’ deployment of WOAs for news production. Together these methods contribute ways to understand previously hidden aspects of media practice and platform governance in a novel methodological design, which may have wider application for future research.

History

Journal

Media International Australia

Article number

ARTN 1329878X221088052

Pagination

1 - 16

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Location

London, England

ISSN

1329-878X

eISSN

2200-467X

Language

English

Notes

In press

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

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