Douyin shuts down live-streaming in Cantonese, calling it “unrecognizable” 抖音禁广东话直播 说广东话就不是文明人？
www.youtube.com

The rationale seems to be that “Ebil CCP wants to censor anti-gov’t protestors while at the same time, homogenizing their national identity”

If anyone close to China can confirm or debunk it, it’d be good

On the other hand, I’m skeptical of this idea

I’m pretty sure Cantonese is still living as the lingua franca of 85 million people out of 1,500 million Chinese people worldwide.), which makes it over 5% of the population’s native tongue able to speak it, mostly in the region itself, though I suppose 60 million of them might be outside China

Meanwhile, languages like Occitan in France and Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland are little to match like that, let alone fucking United States of America, with its Native American languages

In fact here’s an example of this sort of shit…

I still wonder why…

  • cfgaussian
    13·
    9 months ago

    Douyin is not the Chinese government. Bytedance is a private company. If their algorithms suck at detecting regional dialects/languages that is not “the evil CCP suppressing minorities”. It is just something that Douyin needs to work on and improve. If this is actually true, which i cannot verify.

    The reason why i am skeptical if this is that big of an issue is that Douyin is a huge and very widely used platform, and given that there are millions of Cantonese speaking users there would be an absolutely gargantuan outcry against the platform and an issue like this would probably immediately get addressed.

    • deathtoredditOP
      3·
      9 months ago

      Well, yes, but if you watched the video, there was also this sign about vulgar language being forbidden and Putonghua, I assume Mandarin, being mandated, in the park…

      If someone else can translate to just show it means vulgar languages, in a sense of cursing, rather than vernacular, I would pleased

      • cfgaussian
        11·
        9 months ago

        I don’t speak Chinese but i like to think i have some common sense. I see that this video is over a year old. I see that all articles about this same topic are from 2022 and all seem to be copies of an article in Radio Free Asia (massive red flag!). I see that Douyin is still being used in China, including in the Cantonese speaking Guangdong province. From that i can only conclude that Cantonese was not banned and this was just sensationalist clickbait.

        • deathtoredditOP
          3·
          9 months ago

          Sorry, sometimes, I just get emotionally winded up with things like this…

  • davelEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    We need a Chinese equivalent poster child to yeonmi-park to emojify.

  • qwename
    5·
    9 months ago

    The article from 2022 shown at the beginning of the video: https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/douyin-bytedance-cantonese-livestreamers-cut-off-china-moderation/.

    It links to two SCMP articles:

    From what I can find, this is limited to the platform Douyin, and probably includes other Chinese dialects. The speculation as to why this happens is that content that is not in Putonghua (Mandarin) is harder to review.

    All content posted on social media in China has to be regulated by the companies who provide such platforms, and live streams are harder to regulate as they occur in real-time. There would need to be a reasonable number of content reviewers who understand Cantonese or other dialects, and/or better speech recognition tools that can detect those dialects reliably to lessen the load on manual review.

    • deathtoredditOP
      2·
      9 months ago

      All content posted on social media in China has to be regulated by the companies who provide such platforms, and live streams are harder to regulate as they occur in real-time. There would need to be a reasonable number of content reviewers who understand Cantonese or other dialects, and/or better speech recognition tools that can detect those dialects reliably to lessen the load on manual review.

      The thing is, the captions did manage capture what the Canto-speaking person was saying, at least according to the narrator of the video…

    • deathtoredditOP
      4·
      9 months ago

      Thanks… I think this site may come in handy as research for debunking anything “censored”…

      It’s like the time I checked Baidu to confirm if it censored pictures of Winnie the Pooh (because of that stupid meme), and to my surprise, it didn’t…

      (I use google translate, as I’m not Chinese-speaking, nor am I ethnically one…)