Kuaishou's Algorithm, and What This Society Calls Highbrow and Lowbrow

From the moment it started making short videos, so-called vulgarity has clung to Kuaishou like an original sin. Why?

Starting April 5, whoever you were, opening Kuaishou got you the same 101 videos as everyone else.

On April 8, the two videos at the top were What Is It Like to Live in a World Without Lei Feng (《没有雷锋的日子，是一种怎样的体验》), posted by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, and an aerial view of a city in Garzê, posted by a Kuaishou user named Xiaomoli.

CEO Su Hua used to take pride in an algorithm that could, within minutes, put content in front of users that matched their taste. But from April 5 to April 10, they switched the algorithm off. Kuaishou's announcement called it "fixed video guidance." In an earlier apology statement, Kuaishou said that "only works that comply with national laws and regulations, and that follow public order and good morals, can be algorithmically recommended," and that it would "improve the algorithm to give priority to personalized, positive-energy works that better match users' interests, and amplify the influence and appeal of excellent works."

It came out of nowhere. On March 31, CCTV named Kuaishou on air, saying the app hosted large numbers of videos about underage girls getting pregnant, and that this was corrupting public morals. A few hours later, Kuaishou said on Weibo that it had "investigated and deleted several hundred videos that hyped up underage pregnancy, and directly banned a handful of accounts with especially bad influence," and "sincerely apologized to the users affected by these videos."

On April 3, Su Hua issued the apology statement quoted above. Apologizing to users again, he stressed "guiding the algorithm with the correct values." The punishment from China's broadcasting regulator arrived a day later regardless. Citing the airing of programs that violate social morality, and the fact that Kuaishou held no license for the online transmission of audio-visual programs, the regulator ordered the company to purge its stock of content, screen existing accounts, and hold its reviewers and managers to account, among other things.

Kuaishou began a sweeping rectification at once. Besides filling its homepage with fixed videos carrying positive energy, it pulled its own Android app from app stores that same day and banned four big influencer accounts: Paipaiqi, who made his name with the "shehui yao" street dance; the underage couple Wang Lele and Yang Qingning; and Xianyang, a livestreamer known for hanmai shout-rapping.

On April 6, on top of its existing 2,000-person review team, Kuaishou announced it would hire 3,000 more reviewers, with Communist Youth League members and Communist Party members given priority.

That evening, Kuaishou apologized in public for the fourth time, banning users under 18 from livestreaming outright and shutting down the "recommend similar users" feature indefinitely, until it could guarantee the feature was entirely wholesome and full of positive energy.

In a single week, Kuaishou stopped being the short-video app that once ran the slogan "life has no high or low — everyone deserves to be recorded." Now the lives on Kuaishou have been sorted, by the will of the state, into the lofty and the vulgar. Only the lofty gets to be seen. The rest has lost its right to be recorded.

So what exactly is Kuaishou? The question isn't easy to answer.

"My Kuaishou feed is basically all folk craftsmen, little workshops and small factories, and dogs," Gu Yue told QDaily. She lives in Shanghai, used to work in finance, and is now a professional screenwriter. She first came across Kuaishou in 2016. Even now, she doesn't necessarily open it every day, but when she does she watches for at least half an hour.

On her first impression of Kuaishou, Gu Yue said: "It was a perfectly ordinary rural girl chopping firewood, very skillfully. She was delicate and pretty, and the caption read, 'Do you like hardworking girls?' I clicked into her page, and it was mostly her chopping wood, cutting grass, shoveling cement, hauling logs. The contrast was striking — she was slight and pretty, not city-pretty but a raw, rural kind of pretty, and yet she was doing, with total ease, work a city girl her age would never dream of doing."

"I fell for Kuaishou right then. Not out of voyeurism — because I realized I'd never seen this angle before."

At first the videos Kuaishou recommended to Gu Yue were fairly random. People eating giant squid, dancing, young girls and boys wiggling around in selfie videos: for those, Gu Yue would tap "stop recommending this type."

Soon enough, Kuaishou was recommending her all sorts of different videos. "There's one account, for instance, run by a rural inventor who uses Wangzai milk cartons and scraps of wood and little motors to build all kinds of small inventions — remote-control cars, an automatic grinding mill, a floor-sweeping robot made from a plastic bottle. Really creative."

Gu Yue was quickly captivated by these contraptions. "For a while I followed a lot of small folk factories. Plenty of workers record themselves cutting wood, or machining parts on a homemade lathe. There's no particular point to it, it's just documentation, but it's an angle we never get to see. I've also watched people shear sheep and raise crocodiles on there." Watching these videos, she said, "gives you a sense of awe."

Luo Delai's Kuaishou home feed looks completely different — mostly "cooking, eating, and raising dogs." He also follows an account called "Black Cat Detective Gao Ge (Wo Ligao)." Gao Ge's videos are hard to sum up: a dark-skinned man out in the fields, singing, dancing, telling jokes. In his Kuaishou bio, Gao Ge writes: "I like making up my own slogans to express my feelings."

What draws Luo Delai to Kuaishou, besides his sense that the people on it "really do have a gift for performing and for going all-out to be funny," is above all the chance to see how many different people live. "Compared with other platforms, Kuaishou shows me more content that documents lives unlike mine, and documents them more directly."

There's one thing about Kuaishou that Luo Delai thought over and decided that, sensitive as it was, he still had to say. "When Beijing was clearing out its 'low-end population,' Kuaishou's nearby feed was the first place you could see footage of the evictions as they happened. I don't think any other platform was as fast, or as direct."

What Jerry watches most on Kuaishou is Chinese eight-ball, a form of pool played under Chinese rules. Jerry works in finance as an M&A adviser, and came across Kuaishou because he saw Weibo users talking about it. Curious, he downloaded the app and quickly found it had a huge number of short instructional videos on Chinese eight-ball, plus livestreams of matches — "a perfect fit for what I wanted."

A thousand faces for a thousand people: that may be the best way to describe Kuaishou. In that sense, Kuaishou really did live up to its own slogan, "life has no high or low — everyone deserves to be recorded."

Several things, working together, got Kuaishou there.

First, its enormous user base and reach. Kuaishou's Baidu Index began climbing slowly in April 2014, and after March 2015 stayed roughly above the average level of the three years that followed. Kuaishou's own figures show total users passed 100 million in June 2015 and 300 million in February 2016.

A report published by Penguin Intelligence on April 9 put Kuaishou's monthly active users at 230 million. More than 60 percent of them came from third- and fourth-tier cities or below; for China as a whole, that figure is 75 percent. Among China's major internet apps, Kuaishou is the only one that comes close to the country's overall makeup.

That produced the huge difference between Kuaishou and other short-video apps. Every kind of video existed on it. Before the rectification, there were farmers building airplanes and there were firecrackers set off inside pant legs; there was "shehui yao" dancing and there were people livestreaming themselves painting ink-wash landscapes.

Kuaishou also almost never interfered with what users filmed. Other short-video platforms assign staff to get in touch with a user once he blows up and tell him not to film certain things; Kuaishou didn't even have the idea of pushing particular stars. Gao Ge, the man Luo Delai likes to watch, had already picked up 370,000 followers, which makes him a mid-sized influencer. "Kuaishou won't verify any account, even when there are plenty of imitation fake accounts."

"Its random-recommendation mechanism also seems different from other platforms — users with very few followers can still get pushed to the front page. Big account or small, it feels equal," Luo Delai said. Kuaishou also has none of the usual video-platform features: no resharing, no leaderboards, no "influencer" tier.

Last comes the recommendation algorithm Su Hua takes such pride in. Su Hua once worked on Baidu's commercial search engine and has some experience in artificial intelligence. In an interview with Renwu magazine, he said: "Say there are a few people who all happen to like the same person — we'd conclude these people share some trait." It is by picking out traits like these that the algorithm can estimate how well a piece of content matches a given user.

A vast base of videos, an audience spanning enormous differences, no cultivating of stars, recommendations left entirely to the algorithm — in fashionable internet language, Kuaishou is a decentralized platform.

But not everyone saw it that way.

Under QDaily's earlier report on the broadcasting regulator ordering Kuaishou to clean itself up, plenty of comments tied words like "vulgar" and "low" to the app. The argument over Kuaishou's vulgarity goes back a long way. In fact, the first time so-called mainstream audiences learned that a short-video app called Kuaishou existed at all, it was already bound to the word "vulgar."

On June 8, 2016, Huo Qiming, who holds a master's degree in history from Nanjing University, published a piece on his own WeChat account, Doctor X, titled The Cruel Tale of the Underclass: A Video App's Rural China (《残酷底层物语：一个视频软件的中国农村》). It was the first thing to put Kuaishou in front of a mainstream audience.

Huo Qiming's opening line made Kuaishou and rural China the same thing: "If Chairman Mao were alive today, he wouldn't need to spend months touring the countryside — he'd only have to poke around an app called Kuaishou to understand the spiritual state of China's villages." By the third paragraph he had tied the countryside to vulgarity: "When you open this mysterious app, you'll surely wonder how something so vulgar, so crude, so rough could be China's number-one video app. It's because its users are a vast rural population."

He then listed the "cruel and absurd" videos on Kuaishou: firecrackers set off inside pant legs, people eating raw meat from diseased or dead pigs, eight- and nine-year-olds playing gangster, fifteen-year-old mothers-to-be, village gangs that worshipped violence...

Huo Qiming decided rural China was "sinking into chaos on Kuaishou," a sharp contrast to the "speeding high-speed trains and dense towers of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen," the two halves together making up the real China. In a tone of apparent compassion, he quoted John Donne: "as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. / Any man's death diminishes me, / because I am involved in mankind; / and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / it tolls for thee."

The Cruel Tale of the Underclass spread fast, and set off an enormous argument.

The WeChat account Nostalgia Image Project argued that the piece "reflects a fragment, one facet of the truth, but behind that it does more to label, even to demonize, the countryside." Initium Media published a piece by Zhao Sitian, a scholar based in the United States, arguing that The Cruel Tale of the Underclass was "one way the urban middle class imagines the countryside and builds a sense of superiority." Even the news site Guancha criticized it, saying the article was "the blind men and the elephant" — looking at the elephant through a near-voyeuristic lens, hunting for the sensational and manufacturing a talking point.

But the sensational has always been the kind of information people take in most easily. The Cruel Tale of the Underclass quickly built a vulgar image for Kuaishou and for the countryside. On Zhihu, under the question "What do you make of the app 'Kuaishou'?", the answer with more than 28,000 upvotes was simply The Cruel Tale of the Underclass, quoted in full.

Even if Huo Qiming's article carried an urban sense of superiority, there was no denying that Kuaishou did have plenty of sensational content on it. A month before The Cruel Tale of the Underclass appeared, a Kuaishou user called Foodie Fengjie had caught the internet's attention. She livestreamed herself eating mealworms, loaches, and light bulbs. Users soon began to suspect that the woman was being controlled by her son and forced to eat these revolting things.

The police stepped in. Handan police said in a statement on Weibo that Foodie Fengjie and her son did this "to attract attention and drive up video views," and that what she ate — "cactus, chili flakes" and the like — had been treated in advance.

The Cruel Tale of the Underclass magnified this side of Kuaishou. Within a few hours of publication, its readership had climbed past 100,000. But WeChat soon deleted the article, on the grounds that it had been "reported by users and reviewed by the platform, and is suspected of violating relevant laws, regulations, and policies." The Doctor X account was also banned for 30 days.

The Cruel Tale of the Underclass became a turning point in Kuaishou's history.

According to Renwu magazine, before The Cruel Tale of the Underclass Kuaishou didn't even have a brand PR department. Su Hua's first reaction to the article was not a comfortable one: "If you'd asked me at seventeen or eighteen, I'd have gone straight to his door for a fight." But Su Hua did nothing, and only in July, talked round by an investor, did he agree to Kuaishou's first outside interview.

Since it was founded in 2011, Kuaishou had lived a fairly quiet life inside a flashy internet world. Cheng Yixiao, the founder, first positioned it as an app for making GIFs. After Su Hua joined in 2013, it began turning toward short video. In November 2014 the management team dropped "GIF" from the name, which is how the app got the name it has today. By the Baidu Media Index, which measures how often a keyword turns up in press coverage, Kuaishou's score was close to zero until The Cruel Tale of the Underclass made it famous in June 2016.

Kuaishou was quietly piling up users. Su Hua has always insisted that before the second half of 2016 Kuaishou had done no promotion at all, online or off, and that all its growth was organic. That was his own choice: born in a small county town near Zhangjiajie, Hunan — and, of course, needing to differentiate the app from its rivals — he wanted Kuaishou to become a place where ordinary people recorded and shared their lives.

He used this to answer the charge of vulgarity in The Cruel Tale of the Underclass. "What we're building is a diverse, inclusive platform. It is bound to hold people and things of every kind, and different people will look at it from different angles," Su Hua said in a July 2016 interview with iheima.

That line was later expanded into "Kuaishou is a projection of this society," which Su Hua repeated over and over. In July 2017, in an interview with Economic Daily, he said: "Right now young people in small towns are still the majority. The day young people in cities become the majority, our users will mostly be young people in cities... Whether something is countrified or not is a relative idea. Taste is a personal choice, with a large subjective component."

Videos of people eating raw meat from diseased or dead pigs did exist, but food videos were also a major category on Kuaishou: a user called Dish-Shouting Bro would bellow the name of each ingredient and each cooking technique while he cooked. Pregnant underage girls got attention, but so did girls farming at home, grilling fish, brewing liquor, making bamboo swords. There were workers stringing cables at height, young men using construction scaffolding as a pull-up bar, loggers cutting thick raw timber with machinery, laborers working in Africa...

The content on Kuaishou was sprawling and tangled. For a long stretch afterward, Su Hua kept fighting the assumption that Kuaishou was vulgar. Renwu described him stepping out of the programmer's circle, meeting people from every walk of life, and defending Kuaishou tirelessly. He got limited results, and he put the reason down to how sealed off China's social classes are from each other.

"Isolation" became a popular word. It gets used to explain any suddenly surging new thing that mainstream audiences can't understand.

The most recent example is the shopping app Pinduoduo. Founder Huang Zheng smoothly put Caijing reporters' doubts about Pinduoduo down to the fact that they belonged to "the crowd inside Beijing's Fifth Ring Road": "What we pay attention to is the broadest mass of ordinary Chinese people, and the reasons we've grown are similar to the reasons Kuaishou and Toutiao grew. It's like going to Shenzhen 30 years ago — you could make money doing anything there, not for any special reason, just because you'd picked the right direction."

Maybe that isn't just an excuse. According to the Statistical Report on Internet Development in China (No. 41), published by the China Internet Network Information Center, in 2017 the share of internet users with a bachelor's degree or above fell from 11.5 percent to 11.2 percent. The shares with an elementary-school education or less, and with a middle-school education, rose by 0.3 and 0.6 percentage points; together they account for more than half of China's internet users.

With apps like food delivery, ride-hailing, and bike-sharing, urban residents' usage rates run more than 20 percentage points above rural residents', and the services themselves reach only about 30 to 40 percent of all internet users. Between social classes there really is a gulf, vast and impossible to bridge.

What Kuaishou wants to stress is that it neither exploits nor amplifies any one class. As Kuaishou chief content officer Zeng Guangming told 36Kr, apart from things that plainly break morality and the law, Kuaishou does not interfere with content at all. However China is, that is how Kuaishou will turn out.

Take the underage pregnant girls CCTV named on air. Kuaishou didn't make them; they already existed on Chinese soil. Kuaishou only let more people see them, at which point people living in greenhouses began to cry out about how vulgar Kuaishou could be and asked the government to shut them down — out of sight, out of mind.

In fact, the Su Hua of 2016 probably could not understand why these people were so righteously indignant. He believed in his own algorithm, which meant that, given the mass of video Kuaishou served up, if someone kept seeing vulgar videos on Kuaishou, it had to be because he kept watching vulgar videos.

"If he keeps clicking on rural content or saving it, of course he'll see more rural content. But if he turns that around and thinks Kuaishou is all rural content, that's his own illusion," Su Hua said at a public event in late 2016.

"Some videos are stupid, or self-harming, or carry genuinely screwed-up values. That's unavoidable on any platform where users upload their own videos. The concentration of fools in this world is roughly the same everywhere." Gu Yue says she rarely sees that sort of thing on her own page: "You just press and hold, and a 'show me less of this' button appears. Press it enough times and the algorithm stops recommending that kind of video... Even the giant-squid eaters barely show up anymore."

As for the content mainstream audiences call vulgar, Gu Yue thinks it has to be taken case by case. "The teenage-pregnancy thing isn't a Kuaishou problem, it's a problem of children left behind in the countryside."

As for the "shehui yao" culture that the banned Paipaiqi stood for: "I don't see what's wrong with it. Shehui yao is the shuffle dance of the 1980s, a dance the grassroots invented for themselves and twisted into all sorts of shapes. Maybe the lower middle class thinks flamenco on the streets of Barcelona is classy and shehui yao in a village square is low. That's the lower middle class forcing its sense of superiority on everyone else."

Luo Delai takes the same view. "It may not fit my aesthetic frame, or some other people's, but the people dancing it aren't spreading any values or any harmful information."

Su Hua, for his part, gave Kuaishou a loftier sense of mission. In the interview with Economic Daily, he said: "We want to give more people the possibility of recording their lives, sharing their lives, improving their lives. But how exactly they record, how they share, how they change — I think that should be their own choice."

Yet under wave after wave of outside pressure and misunderstanding, both Su Hua's attitude and Kuaishou's practice have been slowly changing.

At the New Economy 100 CEO Summit in April 2017, Su Hua said: "This year we have a somewhat better brand image. We want more people to know this brand, even people who aren't Kuaishou users. So we've started promoting and publicizing the brand more actively."

From the start of 2017, Kuaishou sponsored variety show after variety show — first Roast! (《吐槽大会》), then Running Man China (《奔跑吧！兄弟》). In July it also teamed up with The Coming One (《明日之子》), a talent show produced by Tencent Video, sending two contestants into the competition through voting on Kuaishou.

Chen Sinuo, who runs Kuaishou's brand, told iheima in an interview that Kuaishou positions itself as a "life-sharing platform," home to large numbers of young people who love life and love sharing it — an audience that lines up well with variety-show viewers. Many talented young people on Kuaishou, he said, simply lacked a channel through which to be discovered, so the tie-up with The Coming One followed naturally.

Kuaishou wanted to project a positive image outward. Inside, it was also trying to deal with the moral question it kept getting attacked over, and its preferred fix was still the technology Su Hua favored. Zeng Guangming proposed: "In media work, a piece of information needs two independent sources; some of Kuaishou's videos could use the same method. If there aren't two independent sources, you could still put a warning label on the video."

It didn't rely on technology alone, of course. In 2014, Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao did the manual review themselves. By early 2017, the manual-review team had grown to several hundred people. By early 2018 it had grown again, to 2,000.

Where to draw the line, though, was never easy to pin down. Su Hua gave the example of "Chen Shan the Alien." Chen Shan has thalassemia, which gives him an unusual appearance, and the videos he posts on Kuaishou often hype him up by flaunting wealth. Su Hua's view: "He needs blood transfusions all year round, and the income he gets [from fans sending virtual gifts] pays for his treatment — he also documents the treatment. Maybe he really does go too far sometimes; we delete it, and the system sends him a private message telling him not to do that."

"Most of Kuaishou's users come from cities below the second tier, and their highest level of education is below high school. What they film looks very low to the urban elite, but they were never inside the elite's frame of judgment," Zeng Guangming said at a press briefing in late 2017.

But the problem Kuaishou faced was not as simple as different groups of people failing to understand each other.

As 2018 began, the government's drive to tighten control over public opinion grew clearer and clearer. In early January, hip-hop was banned outright. On January 28, Weibo's trending-topics list was taken down for a week over its editorial direction. In early February, MC Tianyou was banned from the entire internet. In early March, the Zhihu app was pulled from app stores for a week. In late March, the broadcasting regulator demanded a firm ban on illegally scraping, re-cutting, and re-editing video programs.

What dragged Kuaishou into all this was the videos of pregnant underage girls. As early as June 2017, Weibo users revealed that Wang Lele, a Kuaishou star, had already become a father, and that his girlfriend, Yang Qingning, also a Kuaishou star, had been under 18 when she got pregnant. On March 31 this year, CCTV concentrated its criticism on the phenomenon, pushing Kuaishou back into the eye of the storm.

Kuaishou reacted fast. Shortly after midnight on April 1, it posted an apology on Weibo and shut down a batch of accounts. On April 3, it partnered with Tsinghua University to set up a joint research institute for future media data.

In a speech, Su Hua said: "The world people see today is presented by everyone. Through history, the world we saw was presented by a small few. Today everyone takes part in presenting this world, and when we observe and take in the world this way, some new social problems appear behind it."

"Without a good understanding of society, without reflection on the humanities, technology on its own will also go astray — that's a firm conclusion. But how is this problem finally to be solved? I have a rough idea. It should draw on our understanding of the world, our observation of society, our reflection on the humanities, and use the wisdom of philosophy, amplified by algorithms and the power of technology."

Before Kuaishou could get around to letting reflection on the humanities guide its algorithm, the government's cleanup arrived. Kuaishou was ordered to purge its stock of content, ban accounts, and strengthen its manual review.

On the afternoon of April 10, Kuaishou finally resumed normal updates, but the eight-character slogan on its homepage — "Carry out the rectification, forge ahead" — stayed where it was.

Jerry thinks Kuaishou has changed. "I just wanted to watch something light, and now it's all so serious." He meant the content about the 40th anniversary of reform and opening-up, and the Communist Youth League material, that appeared during the fixed-video period. On top of that, a batch of accounts under the Youth League — Qingwei Studio, Xinhua's Live News and others — were given verification badges by Kuaishou.

Asked about the results of the rectification and its effect on the company, Kuaishou told QDaily that an official announcement would probably follow later.

(At the interviewees' request, Gu Yue, Luo Delai, and Jerry are all pseudonyms.)

Cover image from Unsplash.