Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the moving-into-the-21st-century dept.

Chinese Social Media Site Reverses Gay Content Ban After Uproar

Bowing to intense pressure from millions of internet users, a Chinese social media site said on Monday that it would scrap plans to censor cartoons and video games with gay themes. The site, Sina Weibo, had announced on Friday that it would target gay content as part of a campaign to remove pornographic and violent material from its site. But its efforts were almost immediately criticized as discriminatory and repressive, spawning an outpouring of #Iamgay hashtags and slogans like "gays aren't scary."

On Monday, Weibo said in a post that it would scale back its "cleanup" effort and focus on "pornographic, violent and bloody content" instead of gay material. In a nod to the intense backlash, it thanked internet users for their "discussion and suggestions." [...] Ma Baoli, the founder of Blued, a popular gay dating app, called the uproar a "historic event" in China. He said Weibo's response showed a gradual change in attitudes toward gay people.

[...] Weibo's "cleanup" campaign highlighted the intense pressure that media companies in China face to purge sites of content that the authorities deem offensive. Experts said the government's vague definition of improper content often results in companies' going to extremes to show compliance.

Weibo is China's Twitter.

See also: Weibo to ban gay, violent content from platform
'I Am Gay, Not a Pervert': Furor in China as Sina Weibo Bans Gay Content

Related: Chinese Lesbian Dating App Rela Shuts Down


Original Submission

Related Stories

Chinese Lesbian Dating App Rela Shuts Down 11 comments

A Chinese dating app for lesbians that has more than five million users has been shut down.

The app, Rela, is no longer available in the Android or Apple app stores, and its website and Sina Weibo account have been deleted.

Users began to notice that the app was not accessible last week. It is unclear why it has been shut down.

Rela told its users on WeChat that the service had been suspended for an "important adjustment in service".

"Rela has always been with you and please await its return!"

[...] The state internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has not commented on the shutdown.

Some users have suggested that it was connected to Rela's support for parents of LGBT children who wanted to take part in a "marriage market" in Shanghai on 20 May.

Shutting down such apps must be especially significant for users in socially conservative societies.


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:25PM

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:25PM (#668033) Homepage Journal

    Or it needs to be where a bunch of men share one woman. For sex, for everything. Because they did the 1 Baby policy. They called it 1 Baby. But a lot of times it was 1 boy. They kept trying until they got a boy. And they killed the baby girls. For the sake of Global Warming.

  • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:27PM (19 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:27PM (#668035)

    Here's the one child per couple policy's unintended consequences. Too many dudes and not enough females in the young adult demographic. Now Chinese youth are out loud and proud. I saw this coming.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:31PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:31PM (#668037) Journal

      You and so many others.

      The demographic imbalance also puts the "Chinese Lesbian Dating App Rela Shuts Down" story into a funnier perspective. Gays might be subversive, but lesbians are downright threatening to the Chinese state.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:37PM (#668039)

      Holy sausage fest batman! No fee-male there, just regular male...

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:45PM (15 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:45PM (#668046)

      What? Sorry, but this is stupid. Having too many men doesn't magically make men gay; people's sexual orientation doesn't change like that, or else nerdy young men who can't get a date would all be dating each other, which obviously they don't.

      However, I think it's worth pointing out that since China is still interested in keeping their population numbers stable (hence the one-child policy, which has since been relaxed a bit but not that much), they should be much more accepting of homosexuals, since they tend to have far fewer children than heterosexuals. Homosexuality is theorized to be nature's attempt at population control anyway, a way for a social species to free up some adults from the work (and risk) of pregnancy and child-rearing, so that they can contribute to the tribe's welfare in other ways. We stupid humans have instead been throwing away this opportunity by oppressing them throughout history.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:11PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:11PM (#668075)

        Having too many men doesn't magically make men gay

        It's not magic. It's quite the opposite.

        Now answer me this, why do so many gay men hate women so much? What you didn't know this? I'm surprised. You seem to know all about the gays. Not that I blame them much, women are biologically wired to use men for resources. If I wasn't hard-wired to like the vagina, I'd have nothing to do with them.

        • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:17PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:17PM (#668084)

          Ah yes, the unrestrained misogyny of basement dwellers in the morning!

        • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:25PM

          by looorg (578) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:25PM (#668091)

          why do so many gay men hate women so much?

          They do? What do you base this on? Personal experience or?

          Still it does seem somewhat weird that a lack of females should turn men gay. Men are just wired to penetrate and can't help themselves and a hole is a hole and the hole is the goal so any will just do? That does seem somewhat far fetched. Still it is not unheard off, there are studies with large populations of men without the access to women that turn to homosexual acts -- while still identifying themselves as not-gay. Prison populations is a common example, and it is not limited to just males but females engage in it to. That said I'm not sure being in China is like being in Prison. You still have options, if nothing else you can bang hookers or something similar. Isn't there a chinese tinder (or grindr)?

          I guess one could also argue that the one-child policy has created more gay men. If you abort females, or just put them outside to die -- either way you screw with nature and change the balance. If homosexuality in men is say X% of the population and you increase the size of the male population you will end up with more gay men then you would if you had the normal female-male distribution.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:26PM (6 children)

        by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:26PM (#668093) Journal

        I think it's funny when I hear 'homosexuality is a choice': I had no choice. I looked at guys and went "yup...dude." I looked at girls and went "Wubba, holy smokes, etc"

        I can see girls who are beaten and treated like shit by a guy going lesbian, but I did not see any 'choice'.

        I can see too many guys and too few women meaning: Realdoll purchases for autistic nerds, but turning gay? Not for this guy.
        I grew up in the "You're a fag" generation, but I'm willing to be accepting (maybe not understanding (except for lesbians...bring on the lesbians, lol) but accepting).

        --
        --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:36PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:36PM (#668163)

          Yep. Because lesbianism is right and good because guys can hang their heads in shame. What did we ever do to turn that girl into a lesbian! We are so ashamed and so sorry! We will all self-flagellate for turning a girl off to men forever!

          It couldn't possibly happen that way for gay men. They're just sickos and should be put to death. And straight guys like lesbian pr0n, so there's your real reason.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:53PM (#668179)

          I can see girls who are beaten and treated like shit by a guy going lesbian, but I did not see any 'choice'.

          More likely, women like that were already in-between somewhere on the Kinsey scale, somewhere from 1-3, and a bad experience or two from a man, combined with some kind of opportunity (society more accepting of homosexuality, meeting a suitable partner, etc.) encouraged them to explore their other attraction. The ones who are Kinsey 0s just keep trying different men.

        • (Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:29PM (3 children)

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:29PM (#668260) Journal

          You don't "go lesbian," okay? It's something you're born (or close to it) as; upon coming out to my parents, my mother turned to my father and said "You lost that bet, Mark. I told you 12 years ago." So apparently she knew I was gay at 4, which is weird since I didn't know until 14 and didn't admit it until 16...

          It's also not about hating men. The response of a Kinsey 0 women who hates men is to become celibate, not to start dating women, because *she's not wired like that.* Lesbians are women who naturally and of themselves love (only) other women, not women who hate men due to outside factors. Believe me, if women could choose their orientations, *every single one of us* would be a lesbian.

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:41PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:41PM (#668696)

            I have met lots of women who say exactly the opposite. 'Any woman who has spent any time with women would be so grossed out by them, their hygiene, etc that they would only hook up with guys.'

            Personally I think both those examples are wrong and any person who spent time with themselves, never mind others, would only have sex with themselves, and no glove no love, because god only knows what your OWN hands were in, never mind everybody else's."

            Remember folks, no glove no love, even by yourself, Some STDs can even be transmitted sexually from your own mouth or hand to your genitalia or vice versa!

            • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:07AM

              by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:07AM (#668968) Homepage Journal

              Nasty people (Fake News MSM) say my hand are small. Believe me, they're not small. But when I'm spending time with myself, I wish they were bigger!!

            • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:32PM

              by Unixnut (5779) on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:32PM (#669244)

              > I have met lots of women who say exactly the opposite. 'Any woman who has spent any time with women would be so grossed out by them, their hygiene, etc that they would only hook up with guys.'

              I have to say I have also heard the opposite from many woman. They can't stand being around other woman, let alone dating one. I knew a girl who came out as Lesbian (I guess being put in a strict Catholic all girls boarding school has some side effects), and ended up in multiple long term relationships with women, including living with female partners.

              However in the end she started dating men, she still liked having sex with women, but actually having them as a partner drove her mad. Took some time to find a guy willing to share her with other women, but turns out there is a match for truly everyone in this world.

              Another woman I know had bad luck with men, but said straight up she could not be a Lesbian because she just can't stand women.

                I guess it goes to show you cannot project your own thoughts and opinions on others with regards to their sexuality and attitudes to the same/opposite sex. It is very much a gradient between two points rather than a binary option.

      • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:35PM (3 children)

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 17 2018, @03:35PM (#668130)

        There's two aspects to the China story, what makes men gay, and what story we'll tell ourselves in the West vs the East about gayness. It all seems to boil down to Chinese are not Jews so gayness doesn't matter like it does in the west, its a story about western progressive leftists Jews talking about China, not a story about Chinese talking about themselves.

        As for what makes men gay, there's two sub-aspects of that. First is unusually higher rates of Jewish sexual perversion, Weinstein and the "me too" movement and all that. So there are organic sources of sexual perversion with rates dramatically higher in certain groups than others. Just like the rate of Nobel prizes or pro basketball players or federal felons or elite military infantry varies quite a bit with race and is never zero percent or one hundred percent with any race, but its none the less statistically likely that behind every child actor getting pounded in the butt by a grown man, you'll find a Jewish producer director or similar riff raff, so the stereotype of the gay Jew male lives on, so being anti-gay is being anti-jew and that won't be tolerated in Jew controlled modern USA. Then there's the epidemic model where a significant fraction (not zero, not 100 percent) of adult gayness comes from pedo homo abuse, such that a pretty large fraction of adult pedo homo abusers were themselves abused in an identical way as kids; male homo pedo is a STD. The more successful victims of that disease can drop parts, leading to adult homo or adult pedo not necessarily both at the same time. So there's multiple sources of adult gayness ranging from "just born that way cause of who they are" to "caught it just like HIV from the local kiddie predator" and online social interaction in China would only loosely correlate; China is not going to import a bunch of Jews merely due to social media being invented and "to catch a predator" style meetups are only tangentially related to Chinese social media use (AFAIK). In that way the story is pretty dumb, social media has little to do with gayness and its not like anal didn't exist until twitter. The cause and effect relationship is virtually non-existent.

        This BTW is the source of the whole attitude toward gayness thats gradually become quasi-religious; you're asking people to literally give up or dislike being Jewish (by being born from Jews or born that way sexually and then culturally adopted into being cultural Jews), or deny they were abused as children, neither of which is going to be very convincing to the true believers.

        As for what we'll tell ourselves about gayness in the east vs the west, that's all mixed in with previously mentioned Jewish vastly higher rates of sexual perversion mixed with left wing control of culture and leftism being little more than weaponized organized Jew-philia. Culturally to be a leftist is to be indoctrinated to be a Jew, which is great if its Jewish cooking or respect for education, not so great if its Jewish pedo homo sexual perversion, but its a package deal, you can't get Einstein without Weinstein. So being against gayness or against gay pedo rape is essentially being anti-Semitic and thats generally no longer acceptable in American mass media, leftist politics, and highly censored social media so we must therefore love gayness more than legacy straightness in public to be seen as good people, because not liking gayness is the same as not liking Jews and "muh six million" and all that. So either you idolize gays in public, or everyone hates you for wanting to build crematoriums again, which is kinda unfair, as most people (including many far right nazi types) don't really care as long as its only adults in the bedroom. But China not being overrun with Jews in their media or suffering from Jew-philia as a political party, likely has no reason to care, which makes the whole story more about western leftists talking about Chinese, than likely about actual Chinese themselves, which is weird. Sorta like how Chinese-American food is not what actual Chinese people eat, in general, such that non-foodie westerners think Chinese-American take out food defines Chinese cuisine. I can imagine Chinese-Twitter conversations about General Tso Chicken is likely equally abstract and bizarre for everyone involved.

        Overall I don't think the story or these two subtopics mean much other than to western leftists.

        Personally I think Anime body pillows should be a bigger sexual issue in China. Jews aren't going to creep into China, but historically Japanese have invaded the mainland, so its far more likely they'll have to put up with tentacle rape than with Jewish hollywood exec rape. Also without a large enough population of sexual perverts, the spreading of pedo homo as a cross generational STD can't take off into the epidemic rate of growth, so their version of twitter or grindr is irrelevant. Also no Jews in China means they aren't required to kiss up to gays to keep the Jews (who aren't there) happy, which also means no bad feelings about the whole quasi-religious topic.

        • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:23PM (#668160)

          I can hear the sirens now, not heard since the Regan years. They're coming for you VLM, you escaped your padded room and found a laptop, VPNs and TOR are not enough, they're gonna toss you back where you belong!

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:38PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:38PM (#668168)

            No problem for VLM! He'll just snort some more powdered caffeine and then bore them to death with Moldbug!

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:30PM

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:30PM (#668263) Journal

          If you're trolling, well...good effort, though the end result doesn't work too well. If you're serious, for the love in Madokami, get help. This is some J-Mo-level insanity here.

          --
          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:41AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:41AM (#668480)

        Homosexuality is theorized to be nature's attempt at population control anyway

        Whose theory is that?

        It appears from studies of e.g. penguins that when a couple has more eggs or children than they can manage, or the parents get eaten / killed, that gay uncle who always wanted a child of his own is what saves the otherwise helpless kid from certain death.

        Thus homosexuality is a way of ensuring better survival of the family, the exact opposite of population control.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:18PM

      by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @02:18PM (#668085) Journal

      A smart father would have seen the future and kept only the girls alive: then dowry them off for big money.

      But stupid is as...

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(1)