"Law at Your Fingertips": Understanding Legal Information Seeking on Video-Sharing Platforms in China

TL;DR

This study explores how Chinese users seek legal information on video-sharing platforms like Douyin and Bilibili, highlighting trust formation, emotional support, and challenges in understanding legal content.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of legal information-seeking practices on VSPs and insights into designing trustworthy, accessible legal information environments.

Findings

VSPs help mitigate epistemic discomfort among seekers

Trust and engagement are formed through community interactions

Legal content on VSPs influences emotional support and understanding

Abstract

Equipping laypeople with the capabilities to seek legal information has been an important goal for Legal Empowerment in modern society. However, unlike general information-seeking behaviors, legal information seeking is characterized by high stakes, urgency, and a critical need for emotional support, which traditional text-based searching platforms struggle to satisfy. In recent years, people have been increasingly turning to Video-Sharing Platforms (VSPs) for access to legal information and to fulfill their legal needs. Despite the importance of this shift, such VSP-mediated legal information-seeking practices remain underexplored. Through an observational analysis of legal content on two VSPs (Douyin and Bilibili) and interviews with 20 Chinese information seekers, this study examined the practices and challenges associated with seeking, comprehending, and evaluating legal information on VSPs. We further revealed the formation of trust and engagement on the VSP-based legal knowledge-sharing community, highlighting how VSP affordances helped mitigate seekers' epistemic discomfort and satisfy their needs for emotional support. In the discussion, we provided insights on balancing heuristic and systematic processing to encourage information cross-validation, and offered implications for designing trustworthy civic information systems and fostering an accessible, safe, and efficient information-seeking environment in digital space.