This article originally appeared on our sister website, Urban Family Shanghai.
By Yuzhou Hu
On Monday, the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications ordered domestic video sites to run a self-check and delete all videos containing violent and inappropriate content targeted towards children.
The incident, also known as 'Elsagate,' refers to content found on YouTube with perverted themes disguised as child-friendly videos. The short films usually star favorite characters such as Elsa (hence the name), Spider Man and Peppa Pig, and are often titled using child-oriented names like "Silly Hero Fun." However, the plots shown in the videos are anything but fun, with Elsa, for example, frequently depicted undertaking gruesome surgeries or becoming pregnant.
Children can be easily lured into watching these videos by characters they love, and as a result become affected by the content. To make things worse, whenever a video has finished, the site will automatically recommend similar videos to continue watching. "Little kids haven't developed full abilities to tell right from wrong," remarks Chen Mo, educationalist for children's mental health. "Long-term exposure to taboo content may form false recognition."
After the incident was put under a spotlight, YouTube deleted over 50 channels and 150 thousand videos.
Last week, Elsagate was brought to attention in China when a netizen translated a post originally published on reddit and posted it to Weibo. The post was titled "A group of perverts are targeting kids on YouTube. I used to work for them." In the thread, the author shared his negative experience working at one of these perverted animation companies.
That's when Chinese netizens discovered that a number of these supposedly deleted videos had made their way to domestic sites, and some were even produced by local studios. Shangzhichao, an account on Youku, has uploaded 734 harmful videos and each of them has been played more than 10 thousand times. The account has now been banned by Youku.
On January 20, Tencent, Youku and iQiyi — three major local video platforms — made an official statement advising they have commenced a cleanup campaign. Obscene videos were deleted immediately with the uploader's account banned. Also, keywords such as 'Elsa' and 'Spider Man' were blocked. Two days later, on January 22, Sohu joined the campaign.
This Monday, the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications announced on its official Weibo that it would be keeping a close eye on this issue. Any company continuing to produce or spread the illegal content will receive severe penalties. At the same time, they welcome contact from the public to advise any inappropriate sites and online content.
Two offices of a company involved in the production of the videos were shut down by Guangdong authorities last week.
This article was originally published by our sister magazine Urban Family Shanghai. For more articles like this, visit the Urban Family website, or follow the Urban Family WeChat account (ID: urbanfamilyshanghai).
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