The government agency that oversees censorship of the internet in China has announced a new crackdown on various content that’s been deemed unacceptable, including a focus on videos created with artificial intelligence, and anyone who promotes “pessimism,” according to a new report from Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post.
The Cyberspace Administration of China first announced an annual list of targets for internet censorship in 2020 using the name Qing Lang, which means “clear and bright,” according to the SCMP. And this year’s list includes targets that are both expected and perhaps unexpected to anyone who lives outside China.
The new focus of censorship will target anyone “promoting pessimism and extremism,” having the “wrong career values,” or what’s deemed “money worship,” among a host of other offenses. As the SCMP notes, “pessimism” is an entirely new addition that hasn’t appeared on previous lists.
The censorship body will also place renewed focus on the Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, for special scrutiny, as the entire world sees a rise of new tools that allow anyone to easily create convincing and life-like videos with just a few lines of prompting. What’s broadly dubbed “generative AI” can allow people to get text, images or videos in seconds that may be difficult to distinguish from content created by the average person with a smartphone.
While it may appear that China’s censorship rules should be clear, given the work put in by the government to articulate them each year with Qing Lang, they can be anything but obvious. As just one recent example, there was a crackdown after former premier Li Keqiang died because the government apparently believed “exaggerated praise” of the former Chinese official was actually well-disguised criticism of current Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The Chinese cyberspace watchdog has also been deleting videos of angry homebuyers who feel they’ve been ripped off by property developers over the past two years, as Reuters and Bloomberg both noted in stories last year. One of China’s top economists, Hong Hao, has also been censored over his predictions that China’s property market could take a decade to recover from its current troubles.
The Cyberspace Administration closed over 4,000 websites and removed 55 apps in the second quarter of this year alone, according to a report earlier this year from the SCMP.
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