Chinese regulator summons ByteDance, Alibaba’s platforms over content violations

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By Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s cyberspace regulator summoned ByteDance’s news platform Toutiao and Alibaba’s internet browser operator UCWeb over content violations, making them the latest companies to be targeted by a government crackdown on user behaviour online.

Both platforms were recently penalised for content that “disrupted the online ecosystem order”, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said on Tuesday in two separate statements, mentioning in both that the penalties included “strict disciplinary actions against responsible personnel”.

CAC declared on Monday a two-month nationwide campaign to curb any online content that promotes violent or hostile sentiment in society, the latest drive in the regulator’s years-long goal of creating a “clean and healthy” Chinese cyberspace free of negative or critical sentiments and which also extols the ruling Communist Party’s socialist values.

Toutiao was deemed to have allowed “harmful content” to appear on its trending topic lists and other locations while UCWeb was charged with “allowing non-authoritative sources and non-mainstream media to flood its main trending topics list with entries related to extremely sensitive and malicious cases and events”, according to CAC.

Content violations on UCWeb “involved topics such as cyberbullying and the privacy of minors,” the regulator said.

REGULATOR VOWS TO CREATE ‘CLEAN’ CYBERSPACE

Both statements concluded with CAC pledging to “wield the ‘sharp sword’ of online law enforcement” to create a “clean and healthy cyberspace”.

Toutiao said in a statement it welcomed the regulatory action, pledging to set up a task force and intensify efforts to “combat non-compliant content and malicious trolling”.

CAC in the past two weeks has taken similar action against major platforms including short-video app Kuaishou (1024.HK), microblogging site Weibo (9898.HK), and Instagram-like Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, over content violations.

Concern over negative sentiment has deepened this year as China’s economy has struggled, while youth joblessness has remained a pressing issue.

Separately, other Chinese regulatory bodies have started to increase their scrutiny of other parts of the country’s sprawling private sector.

China’s market watchdog said on Tuesday it had summoned cargo service platform Huolala to order it to “strictly comply” with the anti-monopoly law.

Four days earlier, it launched an investigation into Kuaigou, an e-commerce platform under live-streaming service provider Kuaishou, for suspected violations of China’s e-commerce law.   

Huolala said in a statement that the summoning served as a “profound wake-up call and lesson” for the company, adding that it would strictly comply with anti-monopoly regulations.

(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista, Ethan Wang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Sharon Singleton, Kim Coghill and Gareth Jones)