CYBERSPACE—Following passage of the controversial FOSTA bill by the United States Senate last week, a bill that forces internet sites to tightly police their users in order to prevent any possibility of “sex trafficking,” several large internet services have already taken measures to suppress content that could, even in theory, violate the new law. But recent measures taken by the Chinese government may offer a preview of where internet content regulation in this country may be headed.
In China, a country where strict legal controls on internet content are widespread and extensive, not only are depictions of what the Chinese government calls “abnormal sexual relations” completely banned, the latest internet censorship laws announced just last week now ban videos that parody TV shows, or “distort, mock or defame classical literary and art works.”
China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), the government media censorship body, issued new rules last week—rules that it labeled “extra urgent”—that justify the new censorship of parody videos and re-edited videos that could in theory include such videos as the popular “Bad Lip Reading” series by describing them as “an extremely bad influence on society.”
The ban covers videos that “re-edit content from other works such as classic TV shows and films,” according to a report by the news site Quartz. “According to the body, such videos distort content and take the original videos out of context in order to attract viewers.”
The new rules appear to have been spurred at least in part by a Chinese news reporter who was captured on camera rolling his eyes during a press conference held by a government official last week. The eye-roll video went viral and was re-edited into dozens of satirical videos—before Chinese censors cracked down on the humorous videos, according to a Reuters report on Wednesday.
“It means a lot of content makers will have to transition and make their content more serious. For ‘extra urgent’ notice like this, you have to act immediately,” Wu Jian, a Beijing internet expert told Reuters. “Those who don’t comply in time will immediately be closed down.”
The new censorship rules on parody videos come just three weeks after a report by an internet monitoring group that showed how the Chinese government was employing new technological tools to find and filter individual banned words from the internet—including words that are embedded in images that would not otherwise be detected by standard internet search tools.
The Chinese internet censorship became highly evident during this week’s state visit by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to China. According to media reports out of South Korea, China blocked all searches for such aliases for Kim as “Fatty” and “Fatty the Third.”
Articles containing the more straightforward phrase “Kim Jong Un visit” were also rendered invisible to search engines in China, according to the reports.
But such measures are not unique to China. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced new “terms of service” banning “offensive” language as well as nudity from all of its platforms, including Skype, xBox and Microsoft Office. The move, internet experts speculated, may have been connected to the then-pending FOSTA bill.
