Equipping laypeople with the capabilities to seek legal information has been an important goal for Legal Empowerment in modern society. However, unlike general information-seeking behaviors, legal information seeking is characterized by high stakes, urgency, and a critical need for emotional support, which traditional text-based searching platforms struggle to satisfy. In recent years, people have been increasingly turning to Video-Sharing Platforms (VSPs) for access to legal information and to fulfill their legal needs. Despite the importance of this shift, such VSP-mediated legal information-seeking practices remain underexplored. Through an observational analysis of legal content on two VSPs (Douyin and Bilibili) and interviews with 20 Chinese information seekers, this study examined the practices and challenges associated with seeking, comprehending, and evaluating legal information on VSPs. We further revealed the formation of trust and engagement on the VSP-based legal knowledge-sharing community, highlighting how VSP affordances helped mitigate seekers' epistemic discomfort and satisfy their needs for emotional support. In the discussion, we provided insights on balancing heuristic and systematic processing to encourage information cross-validation, and offered implications for designing trustworthy civic information systems and fostering an accessible, safe, and efficient information-seeking environment in digital space.

翻译：赋予普通民众寻求法律信息的能力，已成为现代社会中"法律赋权"的重要目标。然而，与一般信息寻求行为不同，法律信息寻求具有高利害性、紧迫性及对情感支持的迫切需求等特征，传统文本搜索平台难以满足这些需求。近年来，人们逐渐转向视频分享平台获取法律信息、满足法律需求。尽管这一转变至关重要，但以视频分享平台为中介的法律信息寻求实践仍未被充分探索。本研究通过对两个视频分享平台（抖音与哔哩哔哩）上法律内容的观察分析，以及对20位中国信息寻求者的访谈，深入考察了在视频分享平台上寻找、理解与评估法律信息的相关实践及挑战。我们进一步揭示了基于视频分享平台的法律知识共享社区中信任形成与用户参与机制，阐明了视频分享平台的赋能特性如何帮助缓解寻求者的认知不适，并满足其情感支持需求。在讨论部分，我们提出了平衡启发式与系统式处理以促进信息交叉验证的洞见，并为设计可信的公民信息系统、营造数字空间中可及、安全且高效的信息寻求环境提供了启示。