BEIJING, CHINA: After Beijing announced a crackdown last month on social media posts that are said to “excessively exaggerate negative and pessimistic sentiments,” platforms such as Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu quickly complied, making, at least in the spaces they occupy, the internet a happier place.
After all, the goal of China’s Cyberspace Administration’s two-month campaign was to “create a more civilised and rational online environment” by rectifying “negative emotions.” Amid economic struggles and a challenging job market facing the youth, although this is by no means limited to China, young people have expressed disappointment and disillusionment online, which is what the ban is hoping to address.
Frustrations can spread easily, and the youth-led demonstrations and protests across the region have been fuelled in large part by social media posts.
Behaviour that could cause a post author to get caught in the crosshairs of the Cyberspace Administration includes connecting social issues to identity, region, and gender, “inciting extreme group antagonism,” and “selling anxiety-inducing content and courses related to employment, dating, and education.”
Less surprisingly, referring to education or hard work as “useless,” which would cause “negative and pessimistic emotions” to spread, is also in the mix.
“A clean and healthy online environment benefits the people. We encourage netizens and all sectors of society to actively participate in reporting and jointly resist malicious incitement of negative emotions,” the administration said.
Such a ban is expected to help the minds of the Chinese youth to stay positive in the midst of a challenging environment. Case in point: two months ago, the rate of unemployment for the country’s 16- to 24-year-olds reached an all-time high of nearly 19%. Since then, however, the National Bureau of Statistics has removed students from its most recent calculations and has changed its methods for determining youth unemployment.
Concerns abound, however, that removing one way for young people to air out their despondency may cause more problems for their mental health in the long run.
“If anything, contemporary Chinese history has repeatedly demonstrated that top-down ideological campaigns can hardly eradicate the social roots of problems,” Nanyang Technological University assistant professor of social sciences Simon Sihang Luo told the BBC.
“Even with a powerful government like the Chinese one, it is hard to arrest pessimist sentiments when the economy looks bleak, the job market is cruelly competitive, and the birth rate hits rock bottom.” /TISG
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