In a show of strength, in anticipation of a huge political event, China is cracking down hard on the one thing it hasn’t been able to control — livestreaming.
With 731 million internet users in China — of which 300 million have used livestreaming apps — its no surprise that the country’s livestreaming industry is worth an estimated $9 billion.
China had earlier last month ordered three major online platforms — Weibo, iFeng and ACFUN — to stop all its streaming services, immediately. According to the government, the sites were “not in compliance” with state rules.
Weibo, arguably China’s most popular social media site, is home to 340 million users and relies heavily on video streaming for revenue. The site has for years been at the receiving end of censorship, but much of that was done automatically by keyword scraping, or with an army of censors manually combing through millions of posts.
Livestreaming on the other hand, has bested the government. For one, it being live meant that there was no way to regulate what was being said.
Video is also a lot more difficult to monitor than text — add 300 million people, and that becomes almost impossible.
Many livestreamers broadcast every aspect of their everyday lives, from playing games online to putting on makeup, with some treating it as a full-time job.
So perhaps the bigger surprise is that it’s taken them this long to shut it down.
Stan Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California specialising in Chinese politics and society, said it’s been some time coming. “The Chinese government has been doing a whole series of things leading up to this [ban]…you have them closing down celebrity gossip sites, foreigners not being able to livestream, the removal of American TV shows [on video streaming sites].
“You have the government cracking down, one sector after another, and [livestreaming] was one of the loopholes.”
A systematic shutdown
The decision to ban livestreaming on these main sites certainly did not come overnight.
In December last year, China shut down 4,500 accounts and 3,100 programmes from Beijing-based livestreaming sites.
This year, it went one step further and shut down almost 30 popular livestreaming apps altogether.
The government also moved to ban content depicting LGBTQ relationships, labelling it as “abnormal” sexual activity.
Weibo, which has historically complied with government censorship, came out after…
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