The post below discusses Tong Lihua's 2023 Chinese-language book, 《数字时代的社会法》he has also written a companion article "Ushering in a New Era of User Rights", which is available here.
The law still often talks about life online as if we were only shopping.
That framing no longer fits. A person who loses access to a social media account may lose more than a service, but their audience, archive, livelihood, and public identity as well. A creator removed from a platform may have no practical way to reach the community they spent years building. When romantic attachment to an A.I. chatbot leads a man into criminal activity and self-harm, he is not simply an unhappy customer with a defective product claim. And when platform algorithms determine what speech is visible and what work is available, they are doing more than selling products or providing services.
That is the starting point for Tong Lihua’s argument in Social Law in the Digital Age.
Tong argues that digital platforms are the seat of a new form of ‘digital power’ that no longer fits neatly into traditional understandings of private and public authority. Platforms are not merely businesses; they build and control the transnational virtual environments in which people work, speak, trade, organize, learn, socialize, and participate in politics. They also shape the public sphere in which governments announce policy, provide services, and conduct diplomacy. The result is not just a new business model, but a historical redistribution of power.
The Law of the Horse
In legal circles, “law of the horse” is sometimes used dismissively to describe a field organized around a specific new context rather than legal substance. There is no need for a course (let alone a body of law) called the ‘law of the horse’, because horses are merely the incidental subjects of existing law. There are contract cases involving the sale of horses, torts involving horse bites, and so forth. “Platform law” might seem similarly suspect.
Tong’s answer is that, unlike horses, platforms do present a distinctive legal condition. What looks from one angle like a privacy problem, from another like a labor problem, a speech, contract, or child-welfare problem, is actually the same issue viewed from different sides: the unchecked rise of platforms’ digital power over users. The same structural features repeat across diverse platform disputes: dependence, opacity, unilateral rulemaking, algorithmic ranking, data extraction, high exit costs, and limited process for appeals.
But Tong does not propose a “law of the platform”. Instead, he focuses on the rights of the people and organizations subject to platform power: the users. This emphasis on “user rights” changes the issue from one of regulating a technology company to one of the fundamental protections needed to ensure justice in a world increasingly mediated by digital platforms that are private in ownership but public in function.
The Inadequacy of Consumer Rights Models
Although “consumer” and “user” are sometimes used interchangeably in addressing online disputes, Tong’s “user rights” are not merely rebranded “consumer rights”. Consumer rights consider whether a customer was unfairly harmed during a transaction; user rights ask whether a person or organization has meaningful protection against the arbitrary exercise of platform power.
The consumer relationship is transactional, defined by the exchange of payment for a product or service. By contrast, one becomes a user more casually: by accessing, participating in, or otherwise becoming subject to a platform. Both the buyers and sellers on a commerce platform are users.
Users and platforms also deal in forms of consideration beyond cash. Seemingly “free” services often claim value from users’ attention, data, content, relationships, and dependency. Attention is not merely an audience metric, but a resource that platforms can direct, monetize, and withhold.
Platforms are a type of forum and infrastructure, not just vendors or service providers. They function as intermediaries between users, connecting sellers with customers, creators with audiences, workers with tasks, and even government with citizens. Moreover, they algorithmically control those connections to set access and visibility, shape incentives, and extract value.
The platform-user relationship is thus not only a market relationship; it is a governance relationship. Platforms exercise “digital power” to structure the terms on which users speak, work, trade, learn, and interact on the platform.
Market and labor platforms may sell things or services themselves, but they also set the terms and conditions for transactions among their diverse users. Video and livestreaming platforms are not just services users consume; they are audiences, archives, and workplaces for creators. Social media platforms are not just entertainment products; they are spaces for political participation, public discourse, professional identity, and social belonging.
Because of their broad impact and control, a platform’s harms to users can go beyond the commerce-centered consumer problems of pricing, defects, deception, and negligence. They can reach basic personality rights and human rights, often involving speech, reputation, visibility, identity, participation, intellectual autonomy, access to work, and access to social or professional life.
The issue is not simply product or service quality, but the arbitrary exercise of power. A platform can make decisions affecting these rights without intelligible reasons, meaningful process, or any real opportunity for appeal. It can rewrite the rules after people have built their businesses, reputations, communities, and identities inside its walls.
In classic consumer logic, an unhappy buyer would simply shop elsewhere. But leaving a platform may mean losing your audience, your work history, your contacts, your files, your identity, or your livelihood. The exit costs can be immense.
While consumer law assumes some power imbalance between buyers and sellers, that balance is irreparably skewed in the platform-user relationship. Platforms not only dominate the field; they are the field, able to unilaterally change terms and conditions, redesign visibility, alter enforcement priorities, and determine which complaints receive attention.
The asymmetry is informational as well as financial. Platforms use the vast data they collect on users to profile, predict, rank, nudge, and steer. The algorithmic tools they use to do so remain opaque to users, and often to regulators as well.
And critically, a platform does not only act downward upon individual users, It can also act outward upon public authority. When a platform changes how news circulates, removes or restores a political leader’s account, or alters the visibility of public institutions, it changes the conditions under which public life takes place. That does not make platforms states, but it does mean that public law cannot sensibly treat them as ordinary shopkeepers.
The Utility of User Rights
Tong’s concept of user rights recognizes that users are subject to a platform’s system of rules, rankings, surveillance, incentives, and penalties without true informed consent. It suggests that users should be protected not only against faulty products or unfair transactions, but empowered with rights against arbitrary governance by platforms that they cannot realistically avoid.
Those rights might include the right to know how and why an important decision was made, the right to contest it, the right to non-discriminatory treatment, the right to meaningful participation in rulemaking that affects user interests, the right to understand the scope and purposes of data collection and the functions of algorithms, and the right to substantive remedies.
Seen in Tong’s broader frame, these are not only individual protections, but are a way of rebalancing the power in the digital age. If platforms exercise rule-making power over users and basic social interactions, then users need process, participation, transparency, collective representation, and public-interest enforcement.
And if platforms can influence governments, then states also need legal tools and institutional confidence to regulate the private infrastructure on which public life increasingly depends.
The value of “user rights” is that it allows the law to address not only whether a platform breached a contract, deceived a consumer, or mishandled personal data, but whether the emerging digital order has adequate checks on power. It shifts the question from isolated platform misconduct and sectoral regulation to institutional and social design.
Conclusion
The law may still often talk about life online as if we were shopping, but Tong Lihua’s point is that we are also living, working, speaking, organizing, and being governed there.
He is not the first scholar to notice the growing impact of platforms, but his unique contribution, informed by his decades of policy research and insight as a practicing lawyer, is in providing an integrated response to seemingly disparate issues and grounding that response in the rights of the users.
As platforms become an unavoidable piece of the architecture of public life, the central question is how rights should be protected in a world where citizens, governments, and platforms all now share the terrain of power.
Jeremy Daum is a Senior Fellow of the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center, based in Beijing, with over a decade of experience working in China on collaborative legal reform projects. His principal research focus is criminal procedure law, with a particular emphasis on protections of vulnerable populations such as juveniles and the mentally ill in the criminal justice system, and is also an authority on China’s ‘Social Credit System’. Jeremy has spoken about these issues at universities throughout China and in the U.S.; and has co-authored a book on U.S. Capital Punishment Jurisprudence for Chinese readers. He is also the founder and contributing editor of the collaborative translation and commentary site Chinalawtranslate.com, dedicated to improving mutual understanding between legal professionals in China and abroad.
He translates, writes, edits, does web-design, graphic design, billing, tech support, and social media outreach for China Law Translate.
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