China’s social media platform operators are now volunteering to sanitise their content before the country’s regulator turns its gaze onto them.

In a sign that China’s crackdown on online content is having a chilling effect, two major operators of social media are removing questionable videos and posts and disallowing sharing on their platforms so as not to fall afoul of government censors, which have punished the country’s biggest news aggregator and other video-sharing sites for hosting vulgar content that “disrupted socialist values”.

Weibo, China's Twitter-like service, will clean up lowbrow content on its live-streaming platforms to “ensure they do not disrupt China’s socialist core values” in a campaign that will last three months, the company said in a statement on its official account.

Tencent, the biggest internet company in Asia, has blocked videos from Weishi, Kuaishou, Douyin and Xigua – platforms singled out by regulators for distributing inappropriate content – from playing on its own WeChat and QQ platforms, according to a spokesperson. Continue Reading