This website and article have vanished from the clear web, but remain as relevant and eye-opening today as they did in 2021.

Never forget, it is the “trust and safety” architecture which can and will be repurposed for censorship until people do it to themselves

The truth is, political speech comprised a tiny fraction of deleted content. Chinese netizens are fluent in self-censorship and know what not to say. ByteDance’s platforms — Douyin, Toutiao, Xigua and Huoshan — are mostly entertainment apps. We mostly censored content the Chinese government considers morally hazardous — pornography, lewd conversations, nudity, graphic images and curse words — as well as unauthorized livestreaming sales and content that violated copyright.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210218164156/https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine