China’s online censors target short videos, artificial intelligence and ‘pessimism’ in latest crackdown

The country’s top censorship body has been running an annual online crackdown known as Qing Lang, which means clear and bright, since 2020.

It said this year’s crackdown would benefit people’s mental health and create a healthy space for competition that would help the short video industry develop.

The watchdog said one of the targets of the latest campaign would be content producers who make up stories about social minorities to win public sympathy. It will also crack down on people staging incidents, “making up fake plots and spreading panic”.

It also mentioned several incorrect values that it wanted to remove from the internet including “the wrong career values”, “promoting pessimism and extremism” and “extravagance and money worship”.

In March this year the head of the watchdog said the last crackdown had targeted other incorrect values in areas such as marriage, money, history and relations between ethnic groups.

But this year marks the first time that pessimism was listed as one of the incorrect values and comes as the country’s economy continues to struggle to get back on track after the Covid-19 pandemic.

In recent months several videos have been circulating online showing the plight of would-be housebuyers affected by the crisis engulfing the country’s property sector –heightening concern among internet users about their future economic prospects.

Some of the most widely shared footage involved a couple in the central province of Henan, who won widespread sympathy after documenting how a struggling property developer had stopped work on an unfinished apartment for which they had already made a down payment.

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Later updates highlighted their increasing desperation and said they had been assaulted by the developer when asking for a refund. Late last month most of their social media accounts were suspended.

The crackdown will also prohibit AI-generated fake short videos that manipulate or make up content, or illegally use other people’s voices or faces.

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According to the cyberspace administration, between 2021 and 2022, the Qing Lang crackdown led to the suspension of 1.35 billion accounts, the deletion of 12.63 million illegal or improper messages and shut down 10,500 websites.