The Chinese Diaspora and the Atempted WeChat Ban: Platform Precarity, Anticipated Impacts, and Infrastructural Migration BEN ZEFENG ZHANG, University of Michigan, USA OLIVER L. HAIMSON, University of Michigan, USA MICHAELANNE THOMAS, University of Michigan, USA In August 2020, the U.S. President issued an executive order to ban the Chinese-based social platform WeChat, alleging that WeChat posed a national security risk. WeChat is a vital application for Chinese diasporic communities in the United States. The ban’s status was uncertain for several months before it was temporarily halted and later revoked in 2021. Through interviews with 15 WeChat users and online participant observation, this study examines the anticipated impacts of the potential WeChat ban and participants’ reactions. We fnd that participants described negative consequences of the potential ban, including adverse network and economic efects and disruption of community-building eforts. We also fnd that many participants considered WeChat to be critical infrastructure in the United States, as it has become an indispensable part of their daily lives. To frame participants’ experiences, we introduce the concept of infrastructural migration—the process of users relocating to another digital media service that embodies the properties and functions of infrastructure or moving to an assemblage of diferent applications that meet their infrastructural needs separately. We then discuss implications for designing for infrastructural migration and future considerations for HCI research with diasporic communities. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Diaspora, Infrastructure, Immigration, Platform, WeChat, Social media ACM Reference Format: Ben Zefeng Zhang, Oliver L. Haimson, and Michaelanne Thomas. 2022. The Chinese Diaspora and the Attempted WeChat Ban: Platform Precarity, Anticipated Impacts, and Infrastructural Migration. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 397 (November 2022), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555122 1 INTRODUCTION Zeyu uses WeChat on a daily basis to stay connected with his friends and family both in and outside of the United States. He has fewer than ten contacts on Facebook, but more than 100 on WeChat. He does not often make posts on Moments, 1 but he comments on close friends’ posts as a way to maintain relationships. As a gamer, he is active in several WeChat gaming groups. Last December, when the community spread of COVID-19 in the region was rampant, he used the application to 1 Moments is an equivalent of Facebook’s timeline feature, which allows users to post/share information — text, videos, photos, web links—with their contacts: https://blog.wechat.com/tag/moments/. 397 Authors’ addresses: Ben Zefeng Zhang, University of Michigan, USA; Oliver L. Haimson, University of Michigan, USA; Michaelanne Thomas, University of Michigan, USA. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 2573-0142/2022/11-ART397 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3555122 Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 6, No. CSCW2, Article 397. Publication date: November 2022.