HONG KONG—The Chinese government’s recent clampdown on news and entertainment app company Beijing Bytedance Technology Co. forced the startup to re-evaluate how it managed content, a senior executive said Thursday.
“Social platform companies need to step up for more strict regulatory scrutinies,” Zhen Liu, Bytedance’s senior vice president, said at The Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference in Hong Kong.
Bytedance produces popular news and entertainment apps driven by artificial intelligence.
Chinese authorities shut down Bytedance’s humor app Neihan Duanzi on grounds that its content wasn’t in keeping with “a clean online audiovisual environment.”
Besides the crackdown on Neihan Duanzi, Chinese authorities also ordered four news apps, including Bytedance’s personalized news app Jinri Toutiao, to be temporarily removed from online stores. Toutiao is a personalized news app that claims 120 million daily active users.
To make sure the contents on its apps are trustworthy, Bytedance relies on both machine learning technology and deployment of human censors, Ms. Liu said in response to questions from Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker.
Appearing on the same panel, Fan Bao, chairman and chief executive of investment bank China Renaissance Partners, spoke about growing privacy concerns. In China, data is concentrated in the hands of internet giants, he said, yet antitrust rules aren’t sufficient to address their clout, he said.
“If we can take another look at our antitrust regulations and redefine the ownership of data, and use that as metrics to address these issues, maybe there is way to go about it,” he said.
Concerns over data privacy have been growing globally, mounting in the U.S. after Facebook Inc. disclosed last month that Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm that worked for the 2016 Trump campaign, improperly kept Facebook user data for years despite telling the social network that it had destroyed those records.
Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com