Hubei sets livestream standards, including female dress

Hubei province has issued China's first standard for livestreaming platforms and hosts - including their dress - in a move that aims to weed out misbehaving hosts and impose strict surveillance measures on livestreaming companies.

The standards, which were released on Tuesday, include requirements on content, account supervision, platform inspection and how hosts should dress.

Initiated by Douyu, an online streaming platform based in Wuhan, Hubei province, and jointly formulated by the Hubei Association for Standardization and the Wuhan Software Industry Association, the standards say female hosts should not wear see-through clothes, sexy uniforms, lingerie or flesh-colored tights. Dress of male hosts was not mentioned.

Minors will not be allowed to livestream alone, and will only be allowed take part in a broadcast if a guardian signs an application and provides details of their identity card and household registration.

The standards also call on livestreaming platforms to set up a 24-hour reporting channel for viewers. When a problem account is reported by a netizen, the platform should block its livestream for a period of time or terminate the account within 90 seconds after receiving the report, depending on how blatant the misbehavior is.

Chen Wenting, a student at Renmin University of China and a frequent user of livestreaming platforms, said, "Besides imposing restrictions on registration, the sites should also adopt a social credit system to regulate users' behavior. The sites can take action against those with bad social credit records."

A tip-off system could be led by social organizations and involve the public, she said, while the system would be more effective if people were rewarded for reporting harmful content.

According to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center, there were 425 million subscribers to Chinese livestreaming platforms as of August, a significant number in a country with 802 million internet users.

Sun Jin, head of the Cyberspace Governance Research Institute at Wuhan University, said livestreaming gives ordinary people a bigger chance than ever of becoming widely known. But the sizable industry will only keep thriving if it complies with laws and rules and knows where the boundaries lie. To this end, both livestreamers and platforms have to remain conscious of what they can and cannot do.

Yuan Gang, Douyu's vice-president, said: "We have already used facial identification methods for account registration, and users must provide their ID cards. If they are under 18, they are not allowed to open an account unless they have written permission from their guardian."

The rapid growth of the livestreaming market means there is an urgent need for unified and specific regulations to create a clean and optimistic environment, Yuan said, adding that this is why live broadcast industry practitioners, market supervisors and universities in Wuhan had worked together on the standards.