Tens of millions of Chinese citizens remain quarantined to their homes because of coronavirus, moving much of their daily lives online. Yet those who have been forced into the virtual sphere find themselves navigating another state-imposed minefield: China’s heavily censored internet.
In February, a lecturer of nursing science complained on social media that her online session was hastily shut down when artificially intelligent censors flagged the livestream as “internet pornography.” As the dust-up went viral on Chinese social media, the lecturer explained that she had been doing a class on human birth. A biology teacher from Wenzhou shared similar problems, this time during a livestreamed course on meiosis, the division of sex cells.
These tales reflect a long-standing crackdown. In a country known for its widespread censorship of the Internet, the government’s stated goal of stamping out pornography—an industry known for ushering in Internet innovations, from affiliate links to virtual reality—has been especially intense.
State media has repeatedly referred to porn as a malignant “tumor,” on par with online fraud and gambling: an illness that contaminates the web, Chinese culture, and the rule of law, jeopardizing the well being of the country’s youth.
Certainly, some of the government’s concern about porn is well intended. The inadequacy of sex education in China has made porn the only source of information for millions of young people. At the same time, the government’s censorship can be a blunt-force object than surgical scalpel. When Titanic was rescreened in Chinese cinemas in 2012, for instance, fans were surprised to no longer see the famous scene of Rose lying naked before Jack. A regulatory agency ruled that the scene had to go, given viewers may, as the agency stated publicly, “reach out their hands for a touch.” The emphasis on prudish relationship norms dates back to the Maoist period, during which cultural icons were portrayed as living without sex and marriage.
But puritanism alone is not the purpose of such bans. By placing porn at the center of debates about the Internet, the Chinese government lends a moral narrative to its censorship of the free web. From clamping down on websites to cloud storage to livestreaming, the fight against pornography has long given the Chinese government a scapegoat to rein in the Internet at large.
Using artificial intelligence, Chinese Internet censors today are superb at detecting sexual images. Tech companies such as Alibaba and Tuputech developed algorithms to trawl various online platforms, for pornographic audio, photos, and videos with remarkable accuracy. The search engine Baidu reported removing more than 53 billion pieces of “harmful information” using artificial intelligence in 2019, almost half of which were pornographic. The public security bureau squelched more than 43,000 pornographic websites last year alone.
