Aggregators must give up vulgar news
TOUTIAO, a popular news service smartphone application, has been criticized for pushing vulgar and other improper information to users. Since April 9, at the order of the State Administration of Radio and Television, it closed an improper sub-app and WeChat public account. Later, it withdrew its app from the Apple Store and other smartphone app stores for three weeks so as to make changes. On April Wednesday, Zhang Yiming, its CEO, issued a public apology letter. Thepaper.cn comments:
Toutiao must be one of the most popular smartphone apps, but it is not a news agency. It works by obtaining news releases and updates from other websites and pushing pieces it has selected to users.
As early as 2016, statistics show Toutiao had about 600 million users, of which 140 million are active users. According to a report of Questmobile, an internet data company, every active user of Toutiao spent an average 73.45 minutes on it every day in 2017.
