ChinAI #260: Why are so many young Chinese people joining the Momo army?
The promise and limitations of online anonymity on China's internet
Greetings from a world where…
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Feature Translation: A guide to online anonymity, from countless momos
Context: One WeChat public account I’ve really enjoyed following is Perpetual Light Studio (极昼工作室), a reporting unit under Sohu. Zhou Hang, author of this week’s article (link to original Chinese), also did this longform report on people “piggybacking” off of other people’s faces to avoid having their faces scanned by facial recognition security systems (translation in ChinAI #166).
This week’s feature translation investigates the “Momo” phenomenon on China’s internet. In a great article for MIT Technology Review in December 2023, Zeyi Yang provided some background:
In the face of these changes, some users are taking a more creative approach to online anonymity. I started to notice it earlier this year, with what I thought was a weird trend on Chinese social platforms like Douban and Xiaohongshu: thousands of people using the same pink cartoon dinosaur as their profile picture and “Momo” as their username.
Momo, it turns out, used to be the default profile picture when people used their WeChat login to access other platforms. These people decided to keep it as their shared identity and blend into the crowd…
…Can being a Momo offer complete anonymity? Obviously not. Even if your real name isn’t displayed, you need to use it to register on the platform. And even if you choose the same name and profile photo, the platform still assigns a unique identifier number to each account, which in turn differentiates each Momo from the others.
Maybe that little bit of extra privacy—the pseudonymous state that Momos want, as noted in their “group rule” from last year—is enough to quell their anxieties about being found online.
Key Passages: Why do people adopt the momo name? We start with the experience of Wang Bing, a graduate student who lives a very online life. The article relates:
Wang Bing decided to join the "momo" army because of an unexpected exposure. A year and a half ago, during the postgrad application season, she shared an interesting story about an interview experience she witnessed with her own eyes: The teacher criticized a girl for why she hadn’t decided on a title for her graduation thesis yet and why her progress was so slow. Who was the supervisor? “The girl tremblingly replied: Teacher, you are my supervisor.”
It was posted in a humor group on Douban without mentioning the school or major. Wang Bing never expected that the girl involved would send a private message a few days later. The girl didn't ask her to delete the post, but just said, "You seem to be talking about me." After checking, they were indeed from the same college. Wang Bing took the initiative to delete her posts because she was worried that other people around her would also find out who she was.
Realizing that "it turns out that others can discover me so easily", Wang Bing became surrounded by a deep sense of insecurity…That night, she kept going back through the history and deleting the posts that seemed inappropriate now. Still feeling unsafe, she thought of changing her username to “momo”.
Can joining the sea of momos serve as a relatively effect and low-cost way to protect your personal information online? Zhou Hang writes:
Sometimes, adding momo may actually be helpful. In early 2023, a celebrity’s studio company issued a lawyer’s letter accusing “Douban netizen ‘momo’” of reputation infringement. Momo seems to be treated as an individual. This lawyer's letter made "momo" a hot search topic, causing some momos to laugh at it, and led more people to join the momo army. Some new stickers have also gone viral, with one accompanied by the caption, "There is no lawless place on the Internet, but momo is a lawless outlaw."
Of course, not all momos are nice pink dinosaurs. Some netizens see them as “electronic cockroaches,” and many momos traffic in gossip and malicious attacks. Academic papers that study the phenomenon — one thing I like about this account is that they cite papers from Chinese-language journals like New Media Research [新媒体研究] and Journal of News Research [新闻研究导刊] — do note the downsides of group anonymity: “The information released by momo enriches the Internet ecology, but it also creates hidden dangers of creating and spreading rumors, and risks leaking other people's privacy and breeding cyberviolence.”
The rise of the momo army reflects a desire of Chinese young people to want to return to being invisible people online, without needing to focus on impression management.
Consider an animation screenwriter who has changed all his social profiles to momo. Occasionally, he would see other momos in chat groups with hundreds of people, which would also give him a sense of intimacy. He tried to guess what kind of person the other party was, and finally gave a metaphor, “In a tolerant environment, everyone is like water, and can transform into various things according to the environment.”
Or a surgeon from a big northern city who postures as an upstanding doctor who participates in academic conferences and wins awards on his WeChat moments newsfeed, but he shares the dark secrets of the medical world in his momo account (e.g., hospital bed shortages). In the utopian-sounding vision he pursues, momos can break down their own barriers like water and “gather together to form a sea.”
For more stories, including a girl who became a “police officer momo”, see the FULL TRANSLATION: A guide to online anonymity, from countless momos
ChinAI Links (Four to Forward)
Dual Must-reads: The Promise and Perils of China's Regulation of Artificial Intelligence
Finally got a chance to catch up on this working paper by Angela Zhang, a law professor at Hong Kong University. She makes a persuasive argument that China’s proactive interventions into AI rules “has left the impression that China has stood at the forefront as a global leader in regulating AI.” However, by tracing intricate institutional dynamics, she argues that “given its extensive and deep involvement in the AI ecosystem, the government lacks a strong commitment to regulate the industry.”
***Relatedly, check out Angela’s forthcoming book on China’s tech regulation ecosystem, published with Oxford University Press: High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy.
Should-read: Differences in TC260 standards on GenAI security requirements
GovAI fellow Saad Siddiqui posted an excellent thread that broke down key differences in these GenAI security requirements (by a key Chinese standards-setting body). Among the key changes: “Seemingly hard to comply with restrictions seem to have been removed. Previously, there was a req. for a data blacklist to be maintained - but that's been removed.”
Should-read: Chinese Assessments of AI: Risks and Mitigation Strategies
Using four newly translated documents from CSIS’s Interpret: China project, Rebecca Arcesati and Rogier Creemers “assess how Beijing is weighing the risks and challenges of AI, similarities and differences to the approaches emerging in other capitals, and implications for U.S.-China competition.”
Thank you for reading and engaging.
These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.
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