If your online thoughts are too much of a downer, the Cyberspace Administration of China has a hope to express to you: cheer up. And that’s an order (Radio Free Asia, September 22, 2025).
A sweeping two-month crackdown on online content is coming in China, aiming to restrict posts expressing views from hostility and conflict to “world-weariness,” Beijing’s top internet regulator announced on Monday….
The CAC said that it would target posts that include rumors about China’s economy—which has struggled this year—as well as fabricated information and “sensational conspiracy theories.”…
Officials in Xinjiang last year banned ethnic Uyghurs from using social media apps. Censors tightened restrictions on posts by Tibetans ahead of the Dalai Lama’s birthday last year. Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong say scrutiny of social media and police action based on social posts have intensified since the Article 23 national security law went into effect.
The Register reports that the purpose of the crackdown will be to “quash netizens who ‘maliciously incite negative emotions.’… Some of the material Beijing wants to root out—such as content that incites violence—would likely fall foul of content moderators in many nations. However, China also wants to stop ‘excessively exaggerating negative and pessimistic sentiment’ through content that includes themes such as ‘hard work is useless’ and ‘studying is useless.’ ”
A gender transition
Don’t be too gloomy, but don’t be too gay either.
CCP censorship of gay themes in entertainment has not been comprehensive. But portrayals of homosexuality is one of the things the censors are on the lookout for. And it seems that they’ve found a new ally in artificial intelligence.
AI maul-bots have advanced to the point of being able to plausibly impose changes in the sexual orientation, or rather, the sex, of characters in film. Doing so while retaining even funhouse-mirror resemblance to the original production would be impossible (I hope) if the main character were gay and everything in the story were about being gay. In the present instance, though, we seem to be talking about one minute of screen time. In “what is being seen as a new frontier in censorship, the Chinese version of Hollywood stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s thriller ‘Together’ has altered the gender of a gay character, turning a same-sex relationship into a heterosexual one,” Hindustan Times reports.
The face of one of the men in a gay relationship was replaced during that minute with the face of a woman. Four people who saw the movie in China told Bloomberg News that they didn’t notice anything ganging agley during the altered scene, which as far as they knew was depicting a heterosexual couple.
The Chinese distributor thought to have inflicted the airbrushing has not replied to press inquiries. It has, however, called a halt to distribution for now in order to implement “changes in the film’s distribution plan”—apparently in response to online criticism of the censorship.
