China wages war on apps offering news and jokes

For the Communist Party, this could be a risk

AT THE end of last year Bytedance, one of China’s most talked-about technology firms, seemed to have the world at its feet. Since its founding in 2012 more than 700m users had tried out its apps, which serve people with a diet of news, funny videos and memes, tailored to individual users’ tastes by clever algorithms. The Beijing-based company had been valued at more than $20bn and embarked on a buying spree abroad in a bid to go global.

The picture now is less rosy. On April 9th state media reported that Chinese regulators had suspended Bytedance’s flagship app, Jinri Toutiao (Today’s Headlines) for three weeks. They had also banned outright another of its products, a joke-sharing app called Neihan Duanzi, which specialised in bawdy humour and had more than 20m active users. Officials said its “vulgar and banal” content had upset people. Two days later Zhang Yiming, the firm’s founder, issued an apology online saying he was “filled with guilt and remorse” that his apps had taken “the wrong path”. He said his company had not understood that “technology must be led by socialist core values.” He pledged that it would do more to spread “positive energy”.

Bytedance’s travails, and those of three other firms that also had to suspend their news-aggregating apps, suggest that censors are trying to catch up with new technology. Officials appear to worry that people can immerse themselves in news and entertainment which, while posing no direct challenge to the party, fail to promote party views. Personalised news services using artificial intelligence have enabled users to wall themselves off from puff pieces about the party’s latest achievements. (Jinri Toutiao’s slogan, featured in the advertisement pictured above, promises readers “only what you care about”.) David Bandurski of the China Media Project, a research group in Hong Kong, says that “party leaders are aware of this.” This is why Mr Zhang now promises to do a better job of promoting “authoritative media” through his services.

Censors are also paying more attention to content they regard as “lowbrow”: material deemed licentious, sexist or likely to encourage what the party regards as immoral behaviour. State media have reported disapprovingly on the uploading of videos to one of Bytedance’s platforms by teenage mothers who do not appear contrite about having children before the legal age for marriage. Cultural commissars are becoming quicker to suppress anything they regard as non-mainstream, from hip-hop music to tattoos. The national football team recently took to the field with their ink hidden under bandages.

In the past ten months officials have also been clamping down on gossip. Some portals have replaced their feeds offering news about celebrities with alternatives directing users to patriotic fare. Regulators have also shut down the microblog accounts of celebrity-gossip writers. The censors’ reasoning may be that tattle about film stars might lead people to believe that it is also acceptable to peddle rumour about politicians. Or they may have simply decided that reading such news diverts people’s attention from the latest utterances of President Xi Jinping.

Xi’s amazing

Efforts to boost Mr Xi are reaching unprecedented heights. Pictures of him are commanding increasing amounts of space on the front pages of official newspapers. Last month a film called “Amazing China” became the country’s highest-ever grossing documentary, in large part because government offices and state-linked companies have been encouraged to block-book screenings for their staff. The film dwells on the achievements of Mr Xi. In February the media regulator said that it would designate 5,000 cinemas as “People’s Theatres”. These will have to devote more time to films such as “Amazing China” that promote socialist values.

The censors’ shifting priorities are a challenge for Chinese tech firms. Companies that operate social-media platforms or allow users to share content have their own in-house censors. In his online apology, Mr Zhang of Bytedance said he planned to expand his team of them by two-thirds, to 10,000. But such employees are often unsure how to interpret the government’s directives. Last year the New York Times reported that regulators had circulated a less-than-helpful list of 68 types of material that internet firms were expected to expunge, ranging from media that promote “unhealthy marital values” to posts that blur lines between “beauty and ugliness”.

Satisfying the censors also involves financial risk. Bytedance and similar companies will find it much more difficult to attract and retain users without content that is “borderline risqué”, says Bhavtosh Vajpayee of Bernstein, a research firm. Officials’ distaste for news packaged by algorithm could impede China’s development of artificial intelligence, since news aggregators such as Toutiao offer a profitable means of improving such technology.

Above all, the party itself is taking a risk. In the decade or two before Mr Xi took over, people were given wider leeway to amuse themselves as they wished as long as they avoided politics. Officials may have reckoned that such an approach would reinforce stability by giving people less reason to resent the party. Mr Xi, by contrast, is trying to revive the party as an enforcer of morality and taste. By stamping on citizens’ small pleasures he could irritate many people who had previously shown no interest in politics.

The biggest fans of Bytedance’s now-defunct humour app, for example, were men without great prospects living in smaller cities. That the app helped them form groups of like-minded individuals in the real world and engage in pranks such as honking their car horns in a coded sequence may help explain why the authorities shut it down. But by trying to insert more propaganda into such people’s leisure time, officials could end up making the party seem like a bore who doesn’t know when to shut up.

In recent weeks, among the country’s more than 700m internet users, there has been evidence of unhappiness with the party’s meddling. On April 13th Sina Weibo, one of the country’s biggest social-media platforms, declared a three-month effort to purge itself of posts containing pornography or promoting violence or homosexuality—topics that had been ruled off-limits by the regulator. It is possible that Sina decided to mount its campaign in a highly public manner in order to show off its zeal to the party’s media watchdogs.

Angry people flooded the site with messages lambasting the firm’s intolerance of homosexuality. Even the People’s Daily, a party mouthpiece, weighed in against Sina. On April 16th the company said it would no longer target gay content that was not smutty. The incident marked a rare victory for online freedom and for gay rights. It was also a reminder of how contentious and how unpredictable China’s expanding censorship has become.