News aggregators must put content 'firewalls' in place

ON THURSDAY, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television said via its official WeChat account that it had talked with the heads of the Beijing-based Toutiao and Kuaishou because the two news apps had published content contrary to social morality. Beijing News comments:

Having talked with the two news aggregators, SARFT required them to strengthen their review process and make sure their employees reviewed every piece of news before it was released via their platforms.

That move is considered a correction to a mode popular among many news aggregators, namely allowing artificial intelligence to do the selecting. Toutiao, for instance, has been famous for automatically picking news from popular news websites and pushing what they consider the most "interesting" to the users of their smartphone application.