Chinese online video streaming giant Bilibili has revealed plans to recruit 1,000 content censors as a result of the controversy around the recent death of a 25-year-old staff member and ongoing discourse related to overwork in the country’s internet industry, reports the Financial Times. The young man, nicknamed Muse Muxin, was deputy team leader of the graphics and text censoring team at Bilibili’s office in the central city of Wuhan. He had a sudden brain aneurysm at home on February 4 and died in hospital, Bilibili said in a statement on the Weibo social network.
In addition to the new staff, Bilibili said it would set up a counseling service to help ensure the physical and mental wellbeing of its employees. It had 2,413 content monitors at the end of 2020.
The death comes amid a growing rejection of the technology sector’s ingrained culture of overwork—nicknamed “996” in reference to 9am to 9pm working hours six days a week—among young people who are instead embracing a laid-back philosophy of “laying flat”.