When the crackdown on video video games occurred in 2021, the social media business was undoubtedly spooked, as a result of many Chinese folks have been already evaluating short-video apps like Douyin to video video games by way of addictiveness. It appeared as if the sword of Damocles might drop at any time.
That chance appears much more sure now. On February 27, the National Radio and Television Administration, China’s prime authority on media manufacturing and consumption, mentioned it had convened a gathering to work on “enforcing the regulation of short videos and preventing underage users from becoming addicted.” News of the assembly despatched a transparent sign to Chinese social media platforms that the federal government isn’t happy with the present measures and wishes them to provide you with new ones.
What might these new measures appear like? It might imply even stricter guidelines round display time and content material. But the announcement additionally talked about another fascinating instructions, like requiring creators to acquire a license to offer content material for youngsters and creating methods for the federal government to control the algorithms themselves. As the scenario develops, we should always anticipate to see extra modern measures taken in China to impose limits on Douyin and related platforms.
As for the US, even attending to the extent of China’s present rules round social media would require some huge adjustments.
To make sure that no teenagers in China are utilizing their mother and father’ accounts to look at or submit to Douyin, each account is linked to the consumer’s actual id, and the corporate says facial recognition tech is used to watch the creation of livestream content material. Sure, these measures assist forestall teenagers from discovering workarounds, however in addition they have privateness implications for all customers, and I don’t consider everybody will resolve to sacrifice these rights simply to ensure they will management what kids get to see.
We can see how the management vs. privateness trade-off has beforehand performed out in China. Before 2019, the gaming business had a theoretical every day play-time restrict for underage players, but it surely couldn’t be enforced in actual time. Now there’s a central database created for players, tied to facial recognition methods developed by huge gaming publishers like Tencent and NetEase, that may confirm everybody’s id in seconds.
On the content material aspect of issues, Douyin’s teenager mode bans a slew of content material sorts from being proven, together with movies of pranks, “superstitions,” or “entertainment venues”—locations like dance or karaoke golf equipment that youngsters aren’t imagined to enter. While the content material is probably going chosen by ByteDance workers, social media corporations in China are repeatedly punished by the federal government for failing to conduct thorough censorship, and which means selections about what’s appropriate for teenagers to look at are in the end made by the state. Even the conventional model of Douyin repeatedly takes down pro-LGBTQ content material on the idea that they current “unhealthy and non-mainstream views on marriage and love.”
There is a dangerously skinny line between content material moderation and cultural censorship. As folks foyer for extra safety for his or her kids, we’ll should reply some laborious questions on what these social media limits ought to appear like—and what we’re prepared to commerce for them.