Live-streaming

British actor Nigel Dixon is trying to calm frayed nerves in the central Chinese city of Wuhan with his online social media miniseries Mr Pea. The 53-year-old, who does an impersonation of British sitcom character Mr Bean, traveled to the region at the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in early January. He refused to leave Wuhan even as it went into lockdown, saying he worried that he could spread the virus and that he wanted to show support to the people in China.

Ma Gongzuo, a beekeeper in Zhejiang, China, has garnered more than 700,000 followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of video app TikTok. From opening up a hive to swimming in a river to chopping wood, he has used the service to share his day-to-day life in China’s rural areas with his followers.

As TikTok faces mounting pressure from US lawmakers concerned over national security issues and alleged censorship, its parent company, Bytedance, is encountering a different sort of challenge.  Tencent, China’s largest gaming and social media company, is set to invest $2 billion into Kuaishou, a rival short-video platform that competes with ByteDance-owned Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) in China, according to a report by The Information. Tencent and Kuaishou did not immediately respond to requests for comment. ByteDance declined to comment. Tencent is betting that Kuaishou can outcompete Douyin, which is increasingly challenging Tencent’s social media platforms in terms of user atte

A Chinese live-streaming app has lost its appeal and was ordered to pay compensation after a “rooftopper” fell to his death while doing live-streaming from the top of a skyscraper.  Wu Yongning, known as China’s No 1 rooftopper, had more than one million followers on several live-streaming apps and had uploaded almost 300 videos of his daredevil stunts in which he scaled tall buildings without any safety equipment. Wu, who said he relied only on “martial arts training and careful planning,” plunged to his death from the top of the 62-story Huayuan Hua Center in the central Chinese city of Changsha during a live stream in November 2017. He was 26. In May, the Beijing Internet Court ruled that

Governments around the world are scrambling to figure out how to deal with harmful content online, whatever they think it is. The United Kingdom seeks to enforce a mandatory age check for online pornography. Singapore has proposed laws targeting the spread of “fake news.” New Australian legislation punishes social media companies if they fail to take down violent content quickly. While different countries have different things in mind when it comes to what is bad, China’s sophisticated censorship machine could provide a playbook for how to control information. Here’s a look at some of the tools China has used to police the internet. 1) Content bans The Chinese government has a slew of laws