Actually, I think there's a more benign reason and that is references to those kinds of things are just a bit below bar for normally civil programming.
If you've ever watched the banal things that people go through to get something past daytime censors, or, get a PG rating for films etc. it's similar.
This is not 'Xi's authoritarian' system so much as 'different cultural standards of the moment'.
Respect that in some parts of the world they don't talk or joke about STD's in that context.
I wouldn't want to be subject to it, but this is not the kind of censorship that's a problem.
Note that in the West, we 'self censor' tons of jokes or things that might be a bit off.
Finally - I'm 100% certain there are examples of this kind of censorship which are problematic, for example, the mention of 'Taiwan' etc..
I wonder how China protects its censors from wrong ideas (seeing as how they must necessarily come into contact with it). Extra indoctrination? Some kind of surveillance layercake?
I read a scifi where digital personality-recordings became popular for various office/industrial applications. Sorta like an AI, but human. They were used for censorship. The remedy for ideological contamination? Full reboot every morning.
You choose people based on their loyalty to the party and fanatical devotion. It's a pretty straightforward way of doing it, heck somewhere else in this thread someone was already getting offended at the joke about the chicken.
Some people just have no sense of humour and a fanatical devotion to a cause, they are useful if not very wise. This is one of those situations where they are useful.
But this is streaming not broadcast daytime television. Censoring crude jokes/porn/violence that might be happened upon by a toddler flipping the remote makes quite a lot of sense.
If you've ever watched the banal things that people go through to get something past daytime censors, or, get a PG rating for films etc. it's similar.
This is not 'Xi's authoritarian' system so much as 'different cultural standards of the moment'.
Respect that in some parts of the world they don't talk or joke about STD's in that context.
I wouldn't want to be subject to it, but this is not the kind of censorship that's a problem.
Note that in the West, we 'self censor' tons of jokes or things that might be a bit off.
Finally - I'm 100% certain there are examples of this kind of censorship which are problematic, for example, the mention of 'Taiwan' etc..