The New Yorker:

Last week, just as Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, was emerging largely unscathed from two days of congressional testimony about how his company works, the Chinese C.E.O. Zhang Yiming, who was born just a year before Zuckerberg, in 1983, and who also oversees a social-media empire, faced a similar ordeal, but which had a decidedly different outcome.

In 2012, Zhang founded Beijing Bytedance, one of China’s fastest-growing tech startups, which now has a valuation of more than twenty billion dollars and earns much of its revenue from advertising. On April 9th, the day before Zuckerberg’s testimony began, Bytedance was ordered to suspend its most popular product, a news-aggregator app called Jinri Toutiao (Today’s Headlines). The next day, regulators yanked Neihan Duanzi, the company’s social-media platform, where users share jokes and videos. Last Wednesday, Zhang’s official apology appeared on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. His company had taken “the wrong path,” he wrote, and, along the way, he had “failed his users.” Perhaps it was not entirely coincidental that his words echoed a notice posted by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, the country’s media regulator, which accused Bytedance of making apps that offended common sensibility—the news stories on Jinri Toutiao were “opposed to morality” and the jokes on Neihan Duanzi were “off-color.” For these reasons, the state said, the platforms had “triggered intense resentment among Internet users.”

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