Clustered governance: how Chinese social media platforms curate and control influencers’ content creation

This study conceptualises the governance strategies of Xiaohongshu (RedNote), a Chinese e-commerce social media platform, as clustered governance: organising select creators into platform-managed, topic-based groups and providing exclusive support to curate content and incentivise competition. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews with influencers and industry stakeholders, and autoethnography, the research argues that clustered governance offers an illusion of community that collectively manages influencers, whose value is measured through obedience and alignment with platform directives. Xiaohongshu rewards influencers with manually assigned traffic, enacting curatorial power through a dual visibility regime of algorithmic and human curation. This visibility regime also signals an editorial turn in social media content curation. Through rule-based guidance, traffic allocation, and gamified management, influencer groups effectively shape content norms and labour practices, curtailing creator autonomy and creative agency under the guise of community participation and reward. Through the conceptualisation of clustered governance, this study offers a new lens to understand the enduring importance of human curation in platform governance, showing how group management advances the platform’s objectives and shapes influencers’ content creation and labour practices.