China orders short video apps to censor all content, including user comments, political satire and sexual moaning

“Chinese authorities have introduced detailed regulations covering the country’s thriving short video industry, singling out 100 categories of banned content, from smearing the image of Communist Party leaders to sexual moaning, in the latest ongoing effort to clean up its cyberspace that has more than 800 million users,” The South China Morning Post reports.

“The first rule states that all video content, including the title, introduction and viewer comments, need to be reviewed before broadcast. Further, all companies involved in the short video business also need to set up a content reviewing team with a strong political sense,” The South China Morning Post reports. “The move to tighten censorship on short videos, which boast 594 million users in China, comes on the heels of a six-month online clean-up campaign launched by China’s cyberspace administration earlier this month to police information that is deemed ‘negative and harmful.'”

MacDailyNews Take: Negative and harmful to whom? The Communist Party of China, that’s who.

“The association also published rules for short video app operators, who are not allowed to ‘ridicule, satirise, oppose, defame the socialist mode, theory, system, and culture with Chinese characteristics, and the country’s major principles and policies,'” The South China Morning Post reports. “Users are also banned from creating animated images and short clips from national leaders’ speeches or mimicking their gestures and dress.”

“A large section of the new regulations are dedicated to pornography and sexual content,” The South China Morning Post reports. “The sounds of sexual moaning, kissing, caressing, showering, foot fetishism, and nipples visible under clothing, along with other sex-related depictions ‘simply for sensory stimulation purposes,’ are not allowed in videos.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Some people never learn.

A word to the unwise.
Torch every book.
Char every page.
Burn every word to ash.
Ideas are incombustible.
And therein lies your real fear.
   — Ellen Hopkins

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Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited. — Robert F. Kennedy

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The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it. — John Perry Barlow

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