Chinese company apologises for making obscene Peppa Pig videos
A VIDEO production company in China has been forced to apologise after distributing children’s cartoons featuring Peppa Pig and other well-loved characters in violent and disturbing scenarios.
Guangzhou Yinjun Trading Company said it had neglected to think about the harm to children when it was chasing web “clicks” by producing the alarming cartoons, which showed crude renderings of popular children’s characters in violent or sexually suggestive situations.
These had been uploaded to online children’s entertainment channels and shared via social media.
One video showed Princess Elsa from Disney’s Frozen having her head cut open for a tooth to be removed, while another saw Minnie Mouse sever Mickey’s ear with scissors. Yesterday, the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications suspended operations at the two offices of the company after it was found to have been sharing links to the videos via its Happy Disney account on Weibo, a Chinese social media site similar to Twitter.
The company has apologised for the “horrible videos”, admitting: “When we were making videos, our team had one motivation in mind – increasing traffic – but we neglected to think about the harm and influence these videos, featuring horror, could bring to young children. We feel very guilty about the harm these videos could do, and we hereby express our deep apology to children and their parents.”
The Guangzhou Yinjun Trading Company is one of the first firms to suffer the consequences of government action, spurred by Chinese parents who took to social media to warn about the distressing content they’d discovered.
China’s obscenity watchdog earlier in the week ordered all major video platforms to remove and check for content aimed at children that depicts terror, pornography, brutality or violence.
The country’s main online media companies, including Tencent Video, Youku, Sohu and iqiyi, have all promised to remove offending videos and block the accounts that upload them.
The story echoes one that broke in Western media late last year when the Youtube Kids channel was found to be featuring similarly gruesome videos.
The content is thought to have slipped past the Google platform’s algorithm thanks to the uploaders’ clever use of keywords.