Powerful Essay

https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-machine

Some Key Quotes

• I was on a central technology team that supports the Trust and Safety team, which sits within ByteDance’s core data department. The data department is mainly devoted to developing technologies for short-video platforms. As of early 2020, the technologies we created supported the entire company’s content moderation in and outside China, including Douyin at home and its international equivalent, TikTok. 
• When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn’t understand the language. […] We eventually decided not to do it: We didn’t have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored. 
• 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 […]
• Many of my colleagues felt uneasy about what we were doing. Some of them had studied journalism in college. Some were graduates of top universities. They were well-educated and liberal-leaning. We would openly talk from time to time about how our work aided censorship. But we all felt that there was nothing we could do.
• If a user mentioned a sensitive term, a content moderator would receive the original video clip and the transcript showing where the term appeared. If the moderator deemed the speech sensitive or inappropriate, they would shut down the ongoing livestreaming session and even suspend or delete the account
• It was certainly not a job I’d tell my friends and family about with pride. When they asked what I did at ByteDance, I usually told them I deleted posts (??). Some of my friends would say, “Now I know who gutted my account.”
• Around this time last year, many Chinese tech companies were actively deleting posts, videos, diaries and pictures that were not part of the “correct collective memory” that China’s governments would later approve. Just imagine: Had any social media platform been able to reject the government’s censorship directives and retain Dr. Li and other whistleblowers’ warnings, perhaps millions of lives would have been saved today.