(Bloomberg) — Bilibili Inc. denied that it overworked an employee who died during the Chinese New Year holiday, reigniting a debate over the culture of prolonged hours that persists within China’s tech companies.
The country’s largest anime-focused streaming site confirmed that a content moderator, who joined in May 2020, died on Friday, according to an internal memo on Monday shared with Bloomberg News. The male staffer was suddenly rushed to the hospital on the afternoon of Feb. 4 from his home and succumbed to a brain hemorrhage later that evening.
In response to online posts alleging that the man had died of overwork, the company claimed that he didn’t work overtime in the week before his death and that his hours ran between 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
The statement followed a growing outcry on Chinese social media over the death, with Bilibili becoming one of the top trending topics on the Twitter-like Weibo. While tech billionaires such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder Jack Ma have endorsed the culture of “996” working hours — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, with added overtime — as necessary in a competitive industry, there has been growing pushback in recent years and China’s top court issued its most detailed warning last year that the practice is illegal.
The Bilibili death comes more than a year after a Pinduoduo Inc. worker in her early 20s died, prompting authorities to open a probe into conditions at the e-commerce giant.
A hashtag alleging that the man had died from overwork was read more than 230 million times on Weibo. Screenshots and posts from individuals who said they worked at the company described 12-hour night shifts that ran from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. without rest during the Chinese New Year holiday last week.
Job postings on Bilibili’s official website for content moderators, or “auditors,” list requirements including holiday and overnight shifts. As of 2020, the company had hired an army of 2,400 content auditors, or roughly 30% of its total headcount, in cities like Wuhan and Shanghai, according to a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange.
The video-sharing website has repeatedly run afoul of Beijing’s content regulators, with pressure increasing in recent months as authorities stepped up scrutiny of the industry. In 2018, it was removed from China’s major Android app stores for a month after regulators expressed concerns over inappropriate material, prompting the company to double the number of content-moderation staff and pledge to recruit 36,000 “volunteer” censors.
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