"The censor cannot hold: the pressure of controlling China's internet" 6 October 2022

[...] TikTok

Like other bright Chinese of his generation, Zeng spent his undergraduate years abroad, and returned to China with a degree in business administration from Estonia.

His tech savvy ultimately made him an attractive prospect for ByteDance, an upstart Chinese social media company whose global-facing TikTok and inward-facing Douyin were taking on the might of Twitter and Facebook. [...]

Off limits

Zeng said he was part of a team that developed automated systems to filter content the company did not want on its platform.

These systems incorporated artificial intelligence to look at images, and to examine the sound that accompanied them, transcribing commentary and scouring for off-limits language.

If the system flagged a problem, Zeng said it would be passed to one of the thousands of human operatives who could delete the video or halt the livestream.

Mostly they were looking for the kind of thing any social media company might balk at -- self-harm, pornography, unauthorized advertising -- but also anything politically sensitive.

Some imagery was always off limits: pictures of tanks, candles or yellow umbrellas -- a symbol of protest in Hong Kong -- along with any criticism of President Xi Jinping and other Communist Party leaders, according to Zeng.

He said guidance was handed down to ByteDance from the Cyberspace Administration of China, but supplemented by the company itself, ever wary of overstepping purposefully vague rules.

"In China the line is blurred. You don't know specifically what will offend the government, so sometimes you will go beyond and censor more harshly," Zeng said, describing the company's position as "like walking a tightrope".

But the censor's list was fluid, and specific events would trigger an update. [...]