Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
legal information seeking
video-sharing platforms
emotional support
epistemic discomfort
information evaluation
"Law at Your Fingertips": Understanding Legal Information Seeking on Video-Sharing Platforms in China
🤖 AI Summary
Traditional text-based legal information retrieval often fails to address the high-stakes, time-sensitive, and emotionally charged needs of the public. This study investigates how short-video platforms—specifically Douyin and Bilibili—mitigate users’ cognitive load, foster trust, and provide emotional support through their unique media affordances. Drawing on content analysis of legal videos and semi-structured interviews with 20 Chinese users, the research integrates platform observation with user behavior analysis to derive design implications that balance heuristic and systematic information processing. The findings offer a novel pathway toward constructing a trustworthy, secure, and efficient digital legal information ecosystem, advancing the practice of legal empowerment within the context of short-form video.
📝 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.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
video-sharing platforms
legal information seeking
epistemic discomfort
emotional support
trust formation
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