Regulation by users – the crowdsourced adjudication entities and emerging regulabour on Douyin

This article examines the regulatory practices within community-driven regulatory entities on Douyin, the Chinese sister app of TikTok and a leading short video platform. Drawing upon ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, this study reveals that while the community moderators of Douyin perceive themselves as the custodians of Douyin, they have been crowdsourced for granular tasks in an algorithmically coordinated regulatory system and therefore contribute to a sense of regulatory value for Douyin. These entities operate as crowdsourced adjudication systems, selecting and deploying community moderators through a three-stage algorithmic control model for risk management, content sorting and data annotation. In this context, this study underscores the emergence of regulatory labour, or ‘regulabour’, to conceptualise the labour of community moderators that are shaped to generate regulatory value for the platform without adequate recognition or compensation. This study reflects a broader trend in platform capitalism where unpaid user activities are harnessed for regulatory purposes within crowdsourced adjudication systems, demonstrating that exploitation has transcended the binary ‘control-resist’ framework.