Douyin Photo:VCG

Senior management of two Chinese internet giants - Tencent and ByteDance - bickered about short videos, an industry that has been in the limelight in recent years in China, toward which Chinese netizens said it is like "the pot calling the kettle black."

In response to remarks by Sun Zhonghuai, vice president of Tencent, who harshly criticized short videos as entertainment consumer goods that are "very anti-intellectual and vulgar." Li Liang, vice president of ByteDance - the owner of popular short-video platforms Douyin and TikTok - responded on Friday saying that Tencent is vigorously developing its own short video sector, meanwhile attacking it.

The short-video feature dubbed Channels by Tencent is the only short-video platform so far that has yet launched a mode for the underaged as required, Li said.

Channels has already attracted 200 million users in the domestic short video market, which is led by ByteDance's TikTok and Tencent-backed Kuaishou.

Following the ByteDance executive's counterattack, the company posted on Friday on WeChat the history of how ByteDance's internet products were prohibited on Tencent's platforms from 2018 to 2021.

According to the report, Tencent banned six products under ByteDance, affecting more than 1 billion users. Due to such restrictions, more than 49 million people who wanted to share videos on Douyin, which has gained more than 600 million daily active users, to WeChat and QQ meet obstacles each day. ByteDance also expressed anger over Sun's comment on Douyin, calling it "quite arrogant and unfair."

"The technology of personalized content distribution [according to users' likes] is too strong. If you like pig's feed, all you can see on the short video platform is pig's feed, nothing else," Sun said on Wednesday at the 9th China Internet Audio and Video Convention in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province.

Some Chinese netizens expressed a detached view as an onlooker, describing the bickering as "the pot calling the kettle black."

A netizen said while Tencent picks fault with ByteDance's short videos, has it considered the impact of its powerful games on the underaged?

The Shenzhen-based video game giant was sued by a Chinese public-interest group earlier this week over what it alleges is inappropriate content for minors in Tencent's flagship video game Honor of Kings.

Tencent and ByteDance had been engaged in a bitter court battle since last year over what is fair use in China's online entertainment market.

The number of users on short video, other video formats and livestreaming reached 873 million, 704 million and 617 million, respectively, accounting for 88.3 percent, 71.1 percent and 62.4 percent of all internet users, according to the latest industry report released during the convention.

Global Times