Chinese tech giant ByteDance censored content it perceived as critical of the Chinese government on its news aggregator app in Indonesia from 2018 to the middle of this year, six people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Local moderators were instructed by a team from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters to delete articles seen as “negative” about Chinese authorities on the Baca Berita (BaBe) app, the sources said.
BaBe said in a statement that it disagreed with the claims, and that it moderates content according to its community guidelines and in line with Indonesia’s local laws.
Those guidelines, which are published on its Web site, do not mention China or the Chinese government.
Following the publication of this story, BaBe said that before the “more localized approach” it currently uses, it had “some moderation practices in place that were not consistent with our philosophy of having the Indonesian team deciding what is appropriate for its market.”
“These guidelines were replaced last year, and we’ve since built and empowered local moderation teams to make decisions that suit the local market,” the statement added.
It did not immediately respond to a follow-up query asking which month in last year those guidelines changed.
ByteDance in Beijing said that it had no additional comment beyond the BaBe statement.
The Cyberspace Administration of China did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a fax that it has consistently requested that Chinese enterprises abide by international rules and local laws as a basis for developing international cooperation.
It also said that it noted the Indonesian firm’s statement, and hoped media outlets would objectively and fairly report on Chinese companies’ normal overseas exchange and cooperation efforts.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to shut down ByteDance’s TikTok app — widely popular in the US, Indonesia and other countries — on national security grounds unless it is sold to a US company.
Some US lawmakers, including US Senator Josh Hawley, have raised concerns over TikTok’s data security practices and allegations that it engages in censorship at the behest of the Chinese government.
“If ByteDance will censor BaBe in Indonesia, what’s to stop it from censoring TikTok in the United States?” Hawley said, when asked to comment on BaBe’s practices. “We shouldn’t trust any assurances they make. This is another reason TikTok as it currently exists should be banned in the United States.”
A senior Trump administration official also weighed in on the news.
“Entities such as ByteDance ultimately answer to the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] and have a history of censoring free speech to conform to CCP propaganda,” the person said.
The company has repeatedly disputed those allegations.
Indonesia, a country of 270 million people where more than half of the population is aged 30 or younger, is one of ByteDance’s fastest-growing markets.
TikTok has had more than 147 million downloads in the country, data from app analytics firm SensorTower showed.
ByteDance bought Indonesian news aggregator BaBe in 2018 after TikTok was briefly banned in the country for showing “pornography, inappropriate content and blasphemy,” officials said.
In seeking to reverse the ban, ByteDance agreed with Indonesian authorities to hire a team of local TikTok moderators and reinforce its presence in the world’s fourth-largest country, the then-Indonesian minister of communication and information technology and three company sources said.
It then purchased the full operations of BaBe, in which it had been a majority investor.
Soon after, moderation guidelines for BaBe, which uses artificial intelligence to aggregate stories from hundreds of Indonesian media outlets, were crafted by a team from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters, two of the six sources said.
BaBe moderators were also told not publish any articles on the TikTok ban while negotiations with the Indonesian government were underway, the people said.
Under the new BaBe guidelines, articles from partner media outlets that were perceived as critical of the Chinese government would either not be republished on the BaBe app or would be taken down from the app, the six sources said.
Articles with the keyword “Tiananmen,” a reference to China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, or to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) were among those taken down, one person with direct involvement said.
Another direct source described articles about tensions between Indonesia and China over the South China Sea as being banned on the app, even when they came from the state news agency Antara.
Three of the sources said that BaBe was using content guidelines patterned on those used for ByteDance’s Chinese news app, Toutiao (頭條), with some tweaks made for Indonesia regarding the topic of elections, as well as race, ethnicity and religion in Indonesia.
Sensationalist articles on those topics, which are highly 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 the middle of this year, when it became possible to read articles on previously censored topics on the BaBe app, a separate source said, calling it a “learning process for ByteDance.”
ByteDance disagreed with this assessment and said that the guidelines changed last year.
An internal ByteDance presentation from last year describes BaBe as Indonesia’s top news app with more than 8 million monthly active users and 30 million downloads by the end of last year.
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