BEIJING — The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced today it has decided to “punish” 10 livestreaming platforms for "chaotic content,” including “pornography,” “revealing clothing on female cam stars” and "vulgar hot dances.”
Prominent Chinese platforms like Bilibili and iXigua (owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance) “have been reprimanded and ordered to suspend new user registration and overhaul their feeds,” according to Agence France-Presse’s China bureau.
“The 10 platforms are required to ‘rectify’ their content and add the most egregious live-streaming offenders to a cross-platform blacklist,” AFP reported.
The CAC, the chief online censorship body in China, accused “some female livestream hosts” of wearing “revealing clothing, while some male hosts used vulgar words and actions, performed vulgar hot dances... called names and other phenomena despite repeated prohibition.”
The CAC conducted an investigation of 31 platforms and accused some of them of “using pornographic content to attract users” and “organizing illegal gambling.”
The CAC accused these platforms of “seriously deviating from the core values of socialism."
Platforms in the U.S. are currently shielded from similar government-led attacks for third-party content by Section 230 of the Communications Act, though both 2020 presidential candidates have asked for the repeal of the so-called "First Amendment of the internet."
Today’s intervention by the Chinese government comes a year after LGBT discussion groups and search terms were removed from Bilibili by the CAC.
More recently police in Zhengzhou arrested a married couple for performing in a livestreamed, role-playing erotic video in the “Fake Uber” genre. Rideshare app Didi Chuxing also sued the couple for defamation.