The “fish tank”: social sorting of LGBTQ+ activists in China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 2013, LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and other) activism in China has existed in a gray area between noncriminalization in legal terms and fragmented strategies of suppression.The expansion of home-grown social media platforms has provided a (relatively) safe haven for LGBTQ+ people to connect, and a growing number of LGBTQ+ groups have established themselves in the country.However, in recent years, laws, policies, and mass closures of LGBTQ+ social media accounts have chipped away at organizational capacity.In this exploratory study, we center the voices of LGBTQ+ activist communities in China.Drawing from 26 interviews, we explore the effects of increased surveillance in digital and physical spaces on queer communities via the theoretical concept of "social sorting."The findings suggest that LGBTQ+ communities were already under extensive institutional and digital surveillance prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.The pandemic has further amplified state-led surveillance and censorship.The norm setting of an ideal citizen of China has occurred through enhanced institutional marginalization, digital censorship, and police monitoring and harassment.These practices have harmed but not broken the resolve of LGBTQ+ communities, who had been finding unconventional ways to connect prior to the pandemic, albeit constrained as if in a metaphorical fish tank.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".