Videos of binge-eating child taken down

The short video platform Ixigua has permanently shut down a user account featuring a 3-year-old binge-eater, identified as Peiqi, the Chinese name for the cartoon character Peppa Pig, amid allegations of child abuse.

It came after video streaming giants including Kuaishou and Douyin ramped up efforts earlier this month to take down binge-eating content as part of a sweeping campaign to curb food waste and unhealthy entertainment.

Ixigua, owned by Chinese tech giant Bytedance, told Chengdu Business News on Monday that it had also removed all the videos posted by the account since October 2018, the most recent of which depicted the girl binge-eating hamburgers, fried chicken and a wide array of high-calorie foods.

In some of the videos, the parents urged the girl to have more even when she refused to do so, prompting concerns of mistreatment and using the toddler to profit from the short videos at the expense of her health.

Over the span of about two years, Peiqi has grown from what the account followers first described as a "chubby girl" to an obese "big stomach king", as binge-eating livestreamers are known. Her weight reached 35 kilograms, more than twice the average weight for Chinese children of her age, according to screenshots of one recent video that has since been deleted.

However, Peiqi's parents have defended the practice, denying accusations that they made the videos for profit. The pair told the newspaper they had posted the videos for fun and earned only about several hundred yuan, which is not enough to cover the food consumed in the videos.

The parents added the daughter was born big, weighing more than 5 kg.

"How could we feed my own baby so much deliberately?" the pair was quoted as saying.

According to China's Minors Protection Law, parents or other guardians are obliged to care about children's physiological and psychological development, and should create a good family environment.

Huang Dong, a lawyer in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, said on his social media account that the parents may be suspected of abusing the child if the binge-eating practice has caused physical harm and called for more oversight from short video platforms and relevant authorities.

"Platforms should be more careful about censoring such videos, and users should make efforts to report such videos. In that way, the practice can be stopped," he said.

According to China Child Obesity Report released in 2017, childhood obesity can cause serious damage to child development and increase the risk for chronic diseases when they grow older. Overweight and obese children are respectively 3.3 and 3.9 times more likely to develop high blood pressure than their counterparts with normal weight. They are also more likely to develop diabetes or metabolic syndrome in adulthood.