SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Chinese tech giant ByteDance censored content that it considered critical of the Chinese government on its news aggregator app in Indonesia from 2018 to mid-2020, six people with direct knowledge of the case told Reuters.
Logos of Bytedance, the China-based company that shows the short video app TikTok, as Douyin, on an employee card strap, in Beijing, China August 13, 2020. REUTERS / Tingshu Wang
The sources said that local moderators were instructed by a team from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters to delete articles that were seen as “negative” about Chinese authorities in the Baca Berita (BaBe) app.
In a statement to Reuters, BaBe said it disagreed with the claims and that the content was moderated according to its community guidelines and in accordance with Indonesia’s local laws.
Those guidelines, which are published on its website, do not mention China or the Chinese government.
After the publication of this story, BaBe said that prior to the “more localized approach” it currently uses, Babe “had some moderation practices in place that were inconsistent with our philosophy to let the Indonesian team decide what appropriate for its brand.
“These guidelines were replaced in 2019 and we have since built and empowered local moderation teams to make decisions that fit the local market,” the statement added.
It did not immediately respond to a follow-up question from Reuters asking in what month in 2019 those guidelines were changed.
ByteDance in Beijing said it had no further comment on the BaBe statement. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to shut down ByteDance’s short video app TikTok – widely popular in the US, Indonesia and other countries – on national security grounds, unless it is sold to a US company.
Some U.S. lawmakers, including Republican Senator Josh Hawley, have raised concerns about TikTok’s data security practices and accusations of censorship at the request of the Chinese government.
“If ByteDance is going to censor BaBe in Indonesia, what is there to stop censoring TikTok in the United States?” Hawley said when asked for comment on the Reuters story. ‘We should not trust any insurance they make. This is another reason why TikTok, because it currently exists, should be banned in the United States. ”
A senior Trump official also waited in on the news. “Entities like ByteDance are ultimately responding to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and have a history of censoring free speech in order to adapt to CCP propaganda,” the person said.
Indonesia, a country of 270 million with more than half the population under 30, is one of ByteDance’s fastest growing markets. TikTok had more than 147 million downloads in the country, according to data from app analytics company SensorTower.
ByteDance bought Indonesian news aggregator BaBe in 2018 after TikTok was briefly banned in the country for displaying “pornography, inappropriate content and blasphemy”, according to officials.
In an effort to reverse the ban, ByteDance agreed with Indonesian authorities to hire a team of local TikTok moderators and strengthen their presence in the world’s fourth largest country, according to the then Indonesian Minister of Communications and three sources of companies.
It then bought the entire operations of BaBe, in which it had already been a majority investor.
Soon, moderation guidelines for BaBe, which uses artificial intelligence to collect stories from hundreds of Indonesian media outlets, were created by a team from ByteDance’s headquarters in Beijing, two of the six sources said.
BaBe moderators were also told that they did not publish articles on the TikTok ban while negotiating with the Indonesian government, the people said.
Under BaBe’s new guidelines, articles from partner media that were critical of the Chinese government would either not be republished on the BaBe app, or would be taken from the app, according to the six sources.
Articles with the keyword “Tiananmen”, a reference to the outbreak of Tiananmen Square in 1989, or to Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China, were one of the declining ones, said one person directly involved.
Another direct source described articles about tensions between Indonesia and China over the South China Sea as banned on the app, even when they came from the country’s official news agency, Antara.
Three of the sources said that BaBe used content guidelines that were patterned on those used for ByteDance’s Chinese news app, Toutiao, with some adjustments made to Indonesia on the topic of elections, both on race, ethnicity, and religion in Indonesia. Sensationalist articles on those topics, which are very sensitive in Indonesia, would be dropped, they said.
“They wanted a non-political happy tone for the app,” one of the people said.
The guidelines changed in mid-2020, when it became possible to read articles on previously censored topics on the BaBe app, said a separate source, calling it a ‘learning process for ByteDance. ‘
ByteDance disagreed with this assessment and said that guidelines changed in 2019.
A 2019 internal ByteDance presentation reviewed by Reuters describes BaBe as Indonesia’s top news app with more than 8 million monthly active users and 30 million downloads by the end of 2019.
Additional reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington, DC; Brenda Goh in Shanghai, Yingzhi Yang; edited by Jonathan Weber and Nick Tattersall and Edward Tobin
.
