What could those new measures look like? It could mean even stricter rules around screen time and content. On February 27, the National Radio and Television Administration, China’s top authority on media production and consumption, said it had convened a meeting to work on “enforcing the regulation of short videos and preventing underage users from becoming addicted.” News of the meeting sent a clear signal to Chinese social media platforms that the government is not pleased with the current measures and needs them to come up with new ones. That possibility seems even more certain now. It seemed as though the sword of Damocles could drop at any time. When the crackdown on video games happened in 2021, the social media industry was definitely spooked, because many Chinese people were already comparing short-video apps like Douyin to video games in terms of addictiveness. Gaming companies are punished for violations, and many have had to build or license costly identity verification systems to enforce the rule. on weekends and holidays they are supposed to be blocked from using them outside those hours. After denouncing the games for many years, the government implemented strict restrictions in 2021: people under 18 in China are allowed to play video games only between 8 and 9 p.m. You can see that clearly in the Chinese government’s approach to another tech product commonly accused of causing teen addiction: video games. But the shared result is that the state is able to ask platforms to make changes quickly without much pushback. Other times it’s more about the government’s interests, like clamping down on a new product that makes censorship harder. Sometimes it’s in response to a widespread concern, such as teen addiction to social media. The Chinese political system allows the government to react swiftly to the consequences of new tech platforms. Douyin would probably look very similar to TikTok were it not for how quickly and forcefully the Chinese government regulates digital platforms. Why has it taken so long for TikTok to impose screen-time limits? Some right-wing politicians and commentators are alleging actual malice from ByteDance and the Chinese government (“It’s almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids’ development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world,” Tristan Harris, cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology and a former Google employee, told 60 Minutes.) But I don’t think that the difference between the two platforms is the result of some sort of conspiracy. So a lot of the measures that ByteDance is now starting to introduce outside China with TikTok have already been tested aggressively with Douyin. Then, in 2021, it made the use of teenager mode mandatory for users under 14. In 2019, Douyin limited users in teenager mode to 40 minutes per day, accessible only between the hours of 6 a.m. That year, Douyin introduced in-app parental controls, banned underage users from appearing in livestreams, and released a “teenager mode” that only shows whitelisted content, much like YouTube Kids.
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