AT THE end of last year Bytedance, one of China’s most talked-about technology firms, seemed to have the world at its feet. Since its founding in 2012 more than 700m users had tried out its apps, which serve people with a diet of news, funny videos and memes, tailored to individual users’ tastes by clever algorithms. The Beijing-based company had been valued at more than $20bn and embarked on a buying spree abroad in a bid to go global.
The picture now is less rosy. On April 9th state media reported that Chinese regulators had suspended Bytedance’s flagship app, Jinri Toutiao (Today’s Headlines) for three weeks. They had also banned outright another of its products, a joke-sharing app called Neihan Duanzi, which specialised in bawdy humour and had more than 20m active users. Officials said its “vulgar and banal” content had upset people. Two days later Zhang Yiming, the firm’s founder, issued an apology online saying he was “filled with guilt and remorse” that his apps had taken...Continue reading
Source: China https://ift.tt/2EXYNln
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