'Be careful when talking about Tibet': Tool aims to help brands avoid hot water

Kawo, an enterprise WeChat and Weibo social management platform based in Shanghai, has launched a new feature that it claims can save brands from social media posts going wrong.

When a brand makes a post containing potentially contentious words, for example "Taiwan" or "Tibet", the feature will flag it before the post goes out. 

The tool only works on social-media posts, so it wouldn't prevent real-world gaffes like the recent Gap t-shirt design that did not include Tibet or Taiwan on a map of China, even though these are two territories that China claims as its own.

Still, with concern and even paranoia running high among brands following China's calls for 36 airlines to change certain wording on their websites or risk being banned, any help may be welcome. "The philosophy behind the tool is that better process lead to better decisions," said Andrew Collins, CEO of Mailman Group, parent company of Kawo.

Observing appropriate sensitivity in social media posts in China is a growing challenge for Kawo's clients. In the first half of 2018, Collins has seen as many as 50 posts rejected for what the largest social networks deem as containing “illegal content”.

What is "illegal" is only vaguely defined, and Weibo and WeChat often make rejections without giving a clear reason, apart from any posts that contain content that is obviously politically sensitive. "A post announcing tennis results wasn't able to be published because one of the scores was the same as the date of a sensitive event in recent Chinese history," shared Alex Duncan, co-founder and product lead at Kawo.

More mysterious was the post about a new lobster restaurant that got blocked two weekends ago. "The situation is changing every week; it’s impossible to expect content marketers to stay abreast of what they can or can’t say, especially with niche situations in certain industries, said Duncan.

A 2017 survey by four major players in the Chinese social media scene (运营研究社，人人秀，新媒体管家，上线了) found that 79% of social-media executives in China were born since 1990 and over 90% have less than three years' experience. Brands are putting a lot of risk in the hands of young, inexperienced content-marketing executives, Duncan warned.

"The consequences can be incredibly severe, so we wanted to find a way to help protect the brands who publish through Kawo by building the screening for sensitive words into our workflow." A warning, which brands must accept before publishing, pops up and explains why each term, or related URL, is either banned outright or sensitive.

Kawo compiled a set of more than 600 common no-nos (see a sample below), but brands can also configure their own lists with words specific to their sectors, including names of competitors.

Banned utterances like "18-star flag", which is associated with Chinese revolutionaries, words describing obscene acts like "bestiality", or expletives will result in the post being denied right away. For sensitive ones, brands need to exercise caution about the context the words are used in, Duncan explained.

And this is where the grey area begins. Like the mysteriously rebuffed lobster restaurant, the sensitivity of Chinese censors seems arbitrary. Last year, when Trump visited China, all the names of major US talk-show hosts were suddenly barred on Weibo, one of them being Ellen DeGeneres. Until today, the term 艾伦秀 (meaning 'Ellen Show') is still censored, but inexplicably, 艾伦脱口秀 ('Ellen TalkShow') is not.

"From speaking to senior people at some of these big companies, [I found] they're pretty paranoid right now," said Duncan. "They've all expanded rapidly to capture the market and now they have dozens of social profiles being managed by a dozen agencies all over the place in which they have little or no oversight. At any given moment some junior copywriter or marketing executive somewhere down the line could unintentionally post something with far-reaching consequences for the organisation. They have no idea what's going on. On top of that, the marketing teams are all in their 20s and they change jobs every 18 months. Even if they could do training, it would be a constant battle."      

Word/Phrase	Level
6.4	sensitive
1989	banned
13-Mar	banned
20-Mar	banned
3-Apr	banned
4-Jun	banned
43255	sensitive
18 star flag	banned
18禁	sensitive
38th army	banned
71遊行	sensitive
89 movement	banned
89运动	sensitive
april 6th	banned
april fifth	banned
attack	sensitive
a片	sensitive
banned	sensitive
bayi square	banned
bestiality	banned
bitch	banned
bloomberg	banned
bomb	sensitive
breast	sensitive
buddha	banned
buddism	banned
cannibalism	banned
ccp	sensitive
ccp	sensitive
censor	sensitive
charter 8	banned
christianity	banned
clitoris	banned
cochinchina	sensitive
cock	banned
committee	sensitive
communism	sensitive
communist	sensitive
conflict	sensitive
cpc	sensitive
crime	sensitive
cunt	banned
dalai	banned
dalai lama	banned
deauville	sensitive
democracy	sensitive
despotism	banned
dictatorship	banned
dissident	banned
drug	sensitive
drunk	sensitive
eastern lightning	sensitive
election	sensitive
erotic	banned
evil	sensitive
exile	sensitive
facebook	banned
fag	banned
falun	banned
fetish	banned
fifty cents	banned
forged	sensitive
forgery	sensitive
four cleanups	sensitive
freedom	sensitive
fuck	banned
gay	banned
genocide	sensitive
gfw	banned
gov	sensitive
great firewall	banned
great leap	sensitive
homo	banned
homosexual	banned
homosexuality	banned
human rights	banned
immolation	banned
incest	banned
internet blocking	banned
ip block	banned
ip封锁	sensitive
islam	banned
japan	sensitive
jiabao	sensitive
journalism	sensitive
justice	sensitive
ketamine	banned
k粉	sensitive
lama	sensitive
legislative council	sensitive
lesbian	banned
ludovisi	sensitive
machete	sensitive
mao	sensitive
marijuana	banned
massacre	sensitive
may 4th	banned
may fourth	banned
mein kampf	banned
military	sensitive
mongolia	sensitive
monk	banned
multi-party	banned
muslim	banned
nine commentaries	banned
nobel peace	sensitive
nobel prize	sensitive
oppression	sensitive
over the	banned
parade	banned
party-state	banned
pedophile	banned
pedophilia	banned
penetrate	sensitive
penetration	sensitive
petn	sensitive
politic	sensitive
porn	banned
prisoner	sensitive
propaganda	banned
prostitute	banned
prostitution	banned
protest	banned
red terror	banned
reform	banned
regime	banned
religion	banned
resign	sensitive
revolution	banned
rifle	sensitive
satellite tv	sensitive
scrotum	banned
seperatist	banned
sex	banned
shit	banned
sibao movement	banned
sichuan movement	banned
slut	banned
sodomy	banned
taiwan	sensitive
the liaison	sensitive
the unification	banned
theodore de	banned
three years of natural disasters	banned
threesome	banned
tiananmen	banned
tibet	banned
tnt	sensitive
turkestan	sensitive
turkistan	sensitive
turmoil	sensitive
twitter	banned
typhoon rose	sensitive
upskirt	banned
vagina	banned
veteran	sensitive
villeurbanne	sensitive
violence	sensitive
warlord	sensitive
weed	sensitive
whore	banned
wikileaks	banned
xmlhttp	sensitive
youtube	banned
ywhw	banned
zedong	sensitive
zemin	sensitive