Chinese state media highlighted this week the rise of “children influencers” on regime-controlled social media, children producing short video content in which they appear to be subject to a variety of abusive actions such as force-feeding and fighting each other.
The Chinese state newspaper Global Times suggested that the Communist Party would soon enable a broader crackdown on the content, though it mostly highlighted government regulations that already exist against what the Party deems “harmful” content. Chinese state media censors are quick to delete any content that is politically sensitive or considered to dissent from Party orthodoxy, but its main focus on dissent has allowed for a host of other offensive and exploitative content to thrive.
The newspaper report followed an exposé by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV that detailed the various horrifying types of comment starring children that have flourished under regime-controlled social media sites.
“The posted contents include asking minors to devour worms, snails, and weeds; staged videos of siblings fighting or turning against each other in order to fabricate family conflicts,” the Times listed, “posing child models as romantic couples for promotional and livestream sales purposes; inducing minors to say words inappropriate for their ages.”
CCTV highlighted a particularly concerning case about a girl nicknamed Peiqi — the Chinese name for the British cartoon character Peppa Pig — whose parents uploaded videos of her being forced to eat large quantities of food. Peiqi’s now-deleted account claimed the three-year-old weighed about 77 pounds and featured headlines emphasizing the large amount of food the child was being forced to eat, much of it especially unhealthy food such as fried dishes. A report in Taiwanese media highlighting Peiqi’s situation noted that, in one video, the girl appears to ask her parents to let her stop eating food, a request they clearly denied. While Peiqi’s official Chinese social media accounts appear to have been banned, news reports on the child abuse phenomenon appear to still feature some of her content.
The Global Times highlighted Communist Party regulations passed down in January intended to diminish the volume of abusive content on social media that does not explicitly violate other laws, such as restrictions on child pornography or explicit violence. The flagship Chinese state news network Xinhua described the regulations in January as intended to limit “online content that could harm minors,” particularly their “physical and mental health” by inspiring negative copycat behaviors.
“The four categories include content that may induce or encourage minors to imitate or engage in harmful behavior; content that may negatively affect minors’ values; the improper use of minors’ images; and the improper disclosure or use of minors’ personal information,” Xinhua said at the time. The regulations place the onus on the “online content producers and providers of online products and services” to ensure this content is not broadcast. It was not clear from the reporting on the new measures at the time what the consequences for violating these regulations are and whether social media sites face legal repercussions for hosting the content. This week’s Global Times article similarly did not specify how the “measures on the classification of online information” are applied when they are violated.
The Chinese government is quick to punish explicitly political content that it disapproves of, often imprisoning dissidents, journalists, and even human rights lawyers on charges of spurious crimes such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” In one particularly expansive example of this censorship, the Communist Party announced in November 2018 that it had deleted over 10,000 social media accounts on a variety of platforms for political violations. The Chinese Cyberspace Administration explained at the time that the offending accounts allegedly “trampled on the dignity of laws and regulations and damaged the ecology of online public opinion” by “spreading harmful political information, maliciously tampering with the history of the Communist Party, and smearing the reputation of heroes and China.”
The Chinese internet long struggled with the popularity of content featuring child abuse as Beijing focused on silencing legitimate political opinions. The Cyberspace Administration protested in 2021, for example, that massive content hosts such as Alibaba and Tencent were allowing sexually suggestive content featuring children to exist on their platforms.
“With regards to the infringement of the legal rights and interests of minors, a ‘zero tolerance’ attitude will be adopted and enforced to clean up the online problems that endanger the physical and mental health of minors,” the Cyberspace Administration vowed at the time.
Abusive child content on Chinese social media is often not of a sexual nature, however, such as in the case of “Peiqi.” In other cases, the children involved are not in China. In an especially embarrassing episode about a year after the Alibaba and Tencent complaints, the BBC exposed an entire network of Chinese content creators exploiting impoverished children in Africa to create racist videos. BBC journalist Runako Celina tracked down the origin of an especially popular video on Chinese social media showing a group of African children saying in Mandarin, “I am a black monster and I have a low IQ,” clearly not understanding the words they were taught to say. The video was reportedly created in Malawi, where Celina found a Chinese national identified as Lu Ke who posed as a humanitarian aid worker to steal children out of schools and force them to generate racist “comedy” videos for Chinese audiences on the platform Sina Weibo.