Douyin, China’s TikTok, bans thousands of accounts in crackdown against porn, prostitution

  • This initiative continues the decades-long campaign in China against pornography and other content deemed inappropriate by the country’s censors
  • ByteDance-owned Douyin said it has permanently blocked 127,000 accounts this month and helped police track down perpetrators in two cases

A man using a smartphone walks past a sign of ByteDance-owned TikTok, the popular short-video app known in China as Douyin, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on October 18, 2019. Photo: Reuters
Popular short video app Douyin, the Chinese-language version of TikTok, has banned tens of thousands of user accounts to ramp up its campaign against pornography, prostitution and other related illegal activities on its platform.
ByteDance-owned Douyin said it has permanently blocked 127,000 accounts this month and helped police track down perpetrators in two cases, according to its blog post on Tuesday in news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, which the Beijing-based tech start-up also owns.
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