The third distribution is an important means to promote common prosperity for all people and an effective pathway to realizing the essential requirements of socialism with Chinese characteristics. How to encourage Chinese residents to participate more in social donations and thereby advance the development of the third distribution is a question of both urgent practical significance and theoretical importance. The rise of short videos may offer a new, technology-driven approach to addressing this issue. Based on the novel features of short-video technology applications, this paper constructs a general theoretical analytical framework to demonstrate the promoting effect of short videos on household social donations, and it empirically tests the existence of this effect using panel survey data of Chinese households.

The study produces three main findings. First, baseline regression results show that short videos use significantly increases household participation in social donations and contributes to growth in donation amounts. Second, mechanism analysis indicates that short videos has a more pronounced promoting effect on donations by households with lower initial levels of trust, and also a stronger effect on households that perceive livelihood problems as more severe — that is, there exist two channels of influence: trust deepening and opinion reinforcement. Third, extension analyses find that short videos use more strongly stimulates donations by households that perceive higher severity in livelihood issues such as housing, social security, environmental protection, education, and healthcare. These results suggest that employing emerging digital technologies like short videos to promote the development of the third distribution has practical value.

Based on the findings, this paper proposes three policy implications. First, relevant government departments are advised to encourage nonprofit organizations to actively use short videos platforms for outreach and promotion, producing and disseminating emotionally engaging and mobilizing short videos to attract more households to follow and participate in social donations. Second, the government should strengthen review and guidance of charitable short-video content to ensure information is truthful and reliable, avoiding false publicity or inappropriate inducement, and thereby preserving a healthy charitable environment and donation atmosphere. Third, the government can further integrate livelihood-related platforms with philanthropic resources for precise matching: by leveraging short-video platform data and households’ perceived severity of different livelihood issues, it can intelligently match households to appropriate charitable projects and improve the efficiency of philanthropic resource allocation.

This study contributes three innovations. First, it enriches research on the role of digital technology in the development of the third distribution. While academic work on the economic effects of short videos is still emerging, this paper is among the earliest to address— from an economic perspective— the impact of short videos on household social donations and to conduct empirical analysis using nationally representative panel survey data. Second, it explicates the mechanisms through which short videos affects household charitable giving. The paper builds a general theoretical framework and empirically demonstrates that short videos promote household donations via two pathways: trust deepening and opinion reinforcement. Third, it uncovers the positive role of short videos in stimulating household charitable donations. The findings provide new evidence that emerging digital media technologies represented by short videos can further activate residents’ enthusiasm for donating, offering an actionable, technology-based idea to help construct a tertiary redistribution framework.