This study examines how Douyin's platform affordances enable regulatory-risky content and shape relationships between streamers and audiences in Chinese showroom live streaming—a controversial yet profitable genre characterized by intimate performances and virtual gifting. While existing research focuses on performers' labor and precarity, limited attention has been paid to how platforms enable content that operates at the edge of regulatory boundaries. Through a methodological triangulation combining walkthrough analysis, online observation, and in-depth interviews with female streamers, we introduce the concept of "ambiguitance": a constellation of contradictory affordances engineered across a platform's policy, algorithmic, and interface layers. Our findings reveal that while Douyin's policies explicitly restrict sexually suggestive content and discourage tipping, its traffic-driven algorithms implicitly incentivize edge-ball content, and its interface prioritizes monetization features over risk warnings. This ambiguitance creates a space where users navigate between explicit restrictions and implicit incentives, enabling the production and consumption of controversial content. Furthermore, it fosters hierarchical, competitive relationships characterized by uneven risk distribution, where streamers can leverage ambiguity for monetary gain but face disproportionate consequences when audiences weaponize platform policies through reporting. Streamers experience platform affordances as simultaneously empowering and restrictive. This research contributes a novel analytical framework for understanding how platforms strategically engineer governance gaps that serve their interests while displacing responsibilities onto users, offering implications for platform studies and digital labor research.

This paper aims to compare, from the perspective of political economy of communication and philosophy of technology, two distinct historical periods of music consumption via the Internet (from 1996 to 2007 and from 2007 to today) considering the technological, social, aesthetic and authorial changes that have occurred over the last thirty-three years. This broad period begins with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a true legal milestone that marks the beginning of a considerable deregulation of the Internet.

Since this deregulation, which freed the Internet from legal surveillance regarding rights such as Copyright, the entire planet (but, of course, firstly Europe and USA) began to access an ever-increasing volume of audio files, thanks to an innovative format that managed to reproduce audio with acceptable fidelity without being excessively heavy in terms of storage. This “miraculous” format, the mp3, designed to be enjoyed in noisy contexts, with relaxed and distracted listening, while running other programs on the computer or traveling from one place to another (Sterne, 2006) not only enabled new forms of listening but also new ways of socializing and sharing (Bull, 2005).

In the era of the “digital condition” (Sadin, 2013), that is, the era in which most of citizens’ interactions began to be framed and mediated by the use of the Internet, listening to audio files was inseparable from the idea of sharing them, without necessarily requiring financial compensation (that would be the difference between “sharing” and “piracy”).

Growing up with China’s rapid economic expansion and globalization, young Chinese women (aged under 35) living in urban cities found them facing an increasingly consumerist environment, with advanced media-commerce system that promotes certain ideas of womanhood and beauty ideals to incite beauty consumption. This study critically examines how young urban Chinese women negotiate consumerist beauty knowledge with needs of self-care and class-specific consumption. In this process, digital media plays a central in the circulation of beauty care information and gradually converge with retailing platforms. With multimodal analysis and in-depth interview, this study focuses on the followers of Li Jiaqi, China’s most influential beauty e-commerce streamer, to explores the gendered, consumerist Chinese beauty culture, which deeply integrates with media-commerce platforms. Findings from this study suggest that the social construction of "beauty care" is an important device for young women to imagine and practice maturity, personal safety, and class status, displaying a dialectic relationship between body anxiety and feminist awareness.

The transformations brought by digital platforms and streaming services have profoundly altered the dynamics of media production and consumption in Brazil, reshaping the long-established structures of television broadcasting. Historically, TV Globo has been the dominant force in Brazil’s media landscape, pioneering national cultural production, setting audience standards, and establishing a robust international distribution network. However, the global expansion of streaming services has reconfigured traditional audiovisual models, challenging Globo’s dominance and requiring strategic shifts in content production, distribution, and monetization. This study explores Globo’s adaptation strategies by focusing on reality television—a genre that has emerged as a central pillar of the network's response to digital platformization.

It provides an important lens through which to analyse the broader restructuring of traditional broadcasters as they navigate disruptions in audiovisual models and the challenges of sustaining audience engagement in an era of fragmented media consumption.