In 2021, Jiahao, a deaf graphic designer in his mid-20s, realized that his job had hit a dead end. The university graduate was earning just 2,000 yuan ($279) a month, far less than his hearing coworkers. To boost his income, he opened a channel on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and set out to become a content creator.

It was a life-changing decision. After a period of trial and error, including publishing videos about coping with hearing loss-related distress, he found his beat: sharing amusing moments of his life with his hearing boyfriend. At the time of our interview in 2024, his channel had over 250,000 subscribers, many of whom bought from his sponsors and tipped generously, giving him a stable income.

Jiahao is an example of how deaf content creators have found a niche on Chinese short-video apps. Deaf people are using Douyin not just to learn and teach sign language or follow the news, but also to reach beyond the Deaf community with content about their lives, the discrimination they experience, and Deaf-themed films and sign language songs. And for successful creators like Jiahao, the app has become a path to financial independence.

But this narrative of empowerment misses another side of the story: the way apps and audiences reward — or don’t — different types of Deaf content.

From 2023 to 2024, my research partner and I spent six months tracking deaf creators’ Douyin channels and interviewed 15 of them about their work. We found a striking gap between creators’ preferred subjects and their audience’s tastes, one that almost always pushed creators to reframe their content in ways more palatable to the app’s hearing users.

Many deaf creators begin their channels with a passion for explaining the causes of deafness, talking about sign language systems, or debunking popular stereotypes of deaf people as “uneducated” or “dumb,” but these videos are generally met with indifference. While content on “deaf awareness and anti-discrimination” or lifestyle blogging still top all themes by number of posts, we found they generated only 8% and 5% of total views, respectively.

By contrast, deaf creators garner much more attention for videos about Deaf-themed films and sign language songs, their personal relationships, or beauty and fashion topics, which together account for over 85% of their total traffic. These themes are often inspired by external content such as commercial films and align more closely with mainstream cultural trends. Jiahao, for example, received 320,000 likes and over 5,800 comments for a sign-language reinterpretation of a hit song.

Deaf creators feel that they can’t afford to ignore these trends, even when they aren’t their favorite subjects. Haoran, a deaf creator, told us that he did not initially plan to make a video about the 2024 film “Article 20,” in which renowned actress Zhao Liying, who is not deaf, played a deaf mother. That changed after viral clips and celebrity buzz flooded Douyin. “I quickly capitalized on the trend by discussing the sign language used in the film, and the video went viral,” he recalled.

The mismatch is partially a result of Douyin’s largely middle-class, hearing user base and the app’s opaque, algorithm-driven recommendation system, which pushes deaf creators to keep producing viral videos catering to hearing viewers’ interests. Many of our interviewees admitted that they had learned to target hearing audiences by watching what worked on the platform and experimenting repeatedly.

One example of hearing viewers’ sway over deaf creators’ content is the popular “comment, replies, and reactions” genre, where deaf creators take on the challenge of answering absurd, often insensitive questions such as “Does a handshake between two deaf people count as a kiss?” “Do you sign in your dreams or just move your mouth?” or “If you break your arm, does that mean you lose your voice again?”

The creators’ responses to these queries vary from awkwardness to barely concealed annoyance, reactions that only reinforce popular stereotypes of deaf people as being “emotional” — a function of how the cultural grammar and body language of deaf people read as overly animated to many hearing persons. But the videos boost engagement, so creators keep doing them.

Even when viewers are more friendly, many deaf creators still feel the need to commodify themselves to meet their hearing fans’ demand for “emotional value” — a logic baked into short-video apps that has led some scholars to call them “emotional takeout factories.” One creator, Muyang, described her online persona — largely shaped by her fans’ preferences — as innocent and naïve, like a “cute little puppy.”

A common term on the Chinese internet, “persona” denotes the carefully crafted public image maintained by celebrities or influencers. A consistent persona helps maintain a stable fan base, while a “collapse of persona” — breaking away from fan expectations — can be ruinous to a celebrity’s career.

But the never-ending maintenance of a “cute” persona comes at the cost of authenticity and agency. Scholars have argued that the “cute-ifying” of disability aestheticizes vulnerability, producing an empathy that ultimately betrays a sense of superiority among hearing audiences. In this context, the recasting of deaf people as “cute, submissive, and longing for love” trivializes Deaf culture as something to be consumed rather than taken seriously.

Deaf creators are keenly aware of these pitfalls, but feel they have no choice but to play along. Despite decades of work to end workplace discrimination, inequality persists. For deaf people struggling to secure a decent-paying job, short video platforms can seem like a lifeline.

And some even find new confidence in content creation. “Growing up in a rural area was tough,” Muyang told us. “I felt overlooked due to my modest background until social media gave me visibility.”

There are some signs that Douyin is adding support for deaf creators. In the short videos we sampled, most were accessible to hearing viewers through the use of technologies such as subtitles and AI dubbing. However, without broader changes in the platform’s demography and monetization model, even these well-meaning features can inadvertently undermine diversity. For example, Chinese Sign Language appears in only 34.5% of the videos we sampled, while the rest rely on subtitles, less vernacular approaches like signed Chinese characters, or AI dubbing.

Technology is often hailed as a force for inclusion. Douyin, in particular, uses the slogan “Record every kind of life.” But to genuinely celebrate diversity and amplify marginalized voices, the platform needs to do more than offer basic accessibility features. It needs to rethink a monetization model that currently favors narrow, mainstream tastes over real engagement.

As told to Cai Yineng.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG and reedited by Sixth Tone)