The paper presents a methodology to understand WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) from their backend to their frontend, and from tracing the platform's history to its present. Our ‘Backend-in method’ proposes to study platform governance in the meso – between macro political economic concerns and the micro (and usually mobile) user-interface mediation. It shows how including backend platform media practices deepen ethnographic understandings of platform use. The ‘Traceback method’ uses researcher-informant collaboration to document and reflect on the shifts of platform affordances that have reconfigured media practices, organisational structures, and economic incentives over time. We show how these methods proved useful in mapping Chinese-Australian media organisations’ deployment of WOAs for news production. Together these methods contribute ways to understand previously hidden aspects of media practice and platform governance in a novel methodological design, which may have wider application for future research.

中文翻译：

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用新颖的“backend-in”和“traceback”方法研究微信公众号：从后到前和从过去到现在的平台穿行

该论文提出了一种从后端到前端以及从追踪平台历史到现在来理解微信公众号 (WOA) 的方法。我们的“后端方法”建议在宏观政治经济问题和微观（通常是移动）用户界面调解之间研究中观的平台治理。它展示了包括后端平台媒体实践如何加深对平台使用的民族志理解。“追溯方法”使用研究人员与信息提供者的合作来记录和反思随着时间的推移重新配置媒体实践、组织结构和经济激励措施的平台可供性的变化。我们展示了这些方法如何被证明在绘制澳大利亚华人媒体组织部署 WOA 以进行新闻制作方面非常有用。