The plot is dense, the twists are quick, and the emotions are stimulating. Many micro-short dramas really make people unable to stop. However, in order to create the so-called "feeling", some micro-short dramas continue to add weight to the plot, packaging extreme opposition, money worship, class supremacy and even distorted family ethics into so-called "feelings". The emergence of AI technology also allows this type of content to be produced in low cost and in batches.
The State Administration of Radio and Television has recently deployed a new round of special measures to combat the vulgarity and homogeneity of micro-short dramas, which will last for two months from November 1 to the end of December. This governance not only targets the series itself, but also includes film titles, promotional materials, barrage comments, and even platform homepage recommendations and popular lists. How to make micro-short dramas say goodbye to vulgar routines and truly become high-quality?
Mr. Chang from Zhengzhou, Henan is a micro-short drama screenwriter who has just been in the industry for half a year. Recently, he changed his job at a film and television company. What caused him to part ways with his previous company were several differences in script creation. Mr. Chang told reporters that his previous company often required screenwriters to design plots that were extremely confrontational and that challenged the bottom line.
Mr. Chang: In order to directly pursue "coolness" and obtain greater traffic, our previous company asked our screenwriters to create some very polarizing scenes. For example, a scene like "Eating a Household" is extremely contradictory, a story that directly puts human nature and even basic morality to the ground and tramples on it.
Mr. Chang said that in the face of traffic orientation, how to tell the story and how to shape the characters often have to give way to whether the conflict is eye-catching enough.
Mr. Chang: This kind of extreme contrasting scene can achieve a very satisfying feeling, attract a lot of attention at the same time, and make more money. It's just for this kind of fun, to make more money and traffic, to deliberately create some scenes or scenes that are inappropriate in real life.
Since the beginning of this year, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has removed a total of 75,000 illegal micro-short dramas from the shelves and dealt with more than 1,500 illegal accounts in its early special rectification.
The new round of special governance focuses on deepening the governance of children's pornography, soft pornography, extreme opposition, money worship, serious violations of family ethics and other vulgar content; governance of special themes that have not been filed and reviewed as required.
Experts say that these problems are the crux of the problem that plagues the micro-short drama industry.
Li Shu, Dean of the School of Information and Communication at Communication University of China: Micro-short drama is a continuous narrative that sometimes rationalizes and strengthens distorted causal relationships through repeated plot interpretations. For example, as we often see in some short dramas, if you have money, you can look down on others, and if you have money, you can slap others. This has been repeatedly made into the fun part of the drama. It does not teach a person to be bad right away, but it long-termly and systematically sets the threshold of society's perception of what is considered normal, and then lowers it. This is a bottom line in the public cultural environment that should not be touched.
In the first eight months of this year, 430,000 micro-short dramas were launched nationwide, 13 times the number in the whole of 2025, of which AI dramas accounted for more than 90%. But at the same time, there are more and more homogeneous micro-short dramas, often with different titles and protagonists, but the plot routines are exactly the same.
Li Shu said that AI can quickly generate images, characters and dubbing, greatly improving the efficiency of micro-short drama production, but it also amplifies the problems of the micro-short drama industry.
Li Shu: After AI is involved in production, the production cycle of a micro-short drama can be reduced to less than a week, and the cost has been greatly reduced. Our traditional pace of filing, reviewing and launching cannot keep up with the daily, weekly and batch production methods. The new type of infringement cost brought by AI is very low. AI script washing, face changing, and voice cloning form a new type of infringement that is covert, mass-produced, and very difficult to trace.
In response to these problems, a new round of special governance focuses on the problem of vulgarity and homogenization promoted by AI technology, combats the problem of "stealing faces" and "stealing voices", and standardizes the creation of AI micro-short dramas.
The reporter’s investigation found that some AI historical micro-dramas will intersperse the image of a well-known actor for only one or two seconds in the plot, or generate a face similar to the actor, imitate his voice, and use the audience’s familiarity with the actor to attract attention. The shot is very short and the image is not exactly the same. Does such use constitute infringement?
Xie Yongjiang, Director of the Internet Governance and Legal Research Center of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications: To determine whether there is infringement, the length of the shot and whether the image is completely consistent are not the criteria. The core criteria are whether it is identifiable and whether it is used for commercial traffic. As long as ordinary viewers can identify a specific actor and use his popularity to attract traffic, even if the image is similar for only one or two seconds, it may constitute an infringement of portrait rights and voice rights, and may also constitute unfair competition. The platform should speed up the construction of technical capabilities such as frame-level inspections and voiceprint comparisons, while opening up complaint channels for rights holders and quickly handling suspected infringement clues.
Li Shu believes that although the chaos in these short drama industries is different, they have similar traffic-driven logic behind them.
Li Shu: The core logic of platform recommendations now is still the completion rate. By exaggerating content, worshiping money, creating confrontation, and distorting ethics, users can easily be judged as interested because of their curiosity. After multiple rounds of rectification, this routine has rebounded repeatedly. The root cause is not the product at the end, but the machine that drives reproduction. It still operates according to the old parameters and existing business logic algorithms. This is fundamental.
The reporter observed that an important change in this special governance is that the scope of governance has been extended from the work itself to all aspects of communication and promotion. In terms of communication and promotion, the new round of special governance focuses on controlling vulgar content in film titles, promotion materials, barrage comments, and traffic-draining clips; managing the same drama series by changing the title or the name of the protagonist, and re-broadcasting it repeatedly; addressing the issue of homogeneity in first-screen recommendations and key list recommendations on the homepage, and improving the diversity of algorithm-recommended content. Li Shu said that the shift from "managing works" to "managing the entire communication link" means that governance will become more systematic and in-depth.
Li Shu: In this algorithmic environment, the film title is a "hook", the slice is the entrance, the barrage is the emotion, and the algorithm is the steering wheel. In the past, if you only managed the works and reviewed the films, it was equivalent to just turning off the end of the faucet. Its upstream was still pouring in, so there was no way to optimize its ecology. Now we include film titles, slices, barrages, and algorithms. Essentially, we treat the entire link as a governance object. Let the platform put value judgments into the recommendation rules the moment they are written, instead of deleting them when something goes wrong.
Of course, vulgarizing governance does not mean smoothing over all dramatic conflicts. Short plays need to have ups and downs in the plot, the characters can have flaws, and the story can be exaggerated. What are the standards for platform review?
Li Shu: When we watch a drama, do we treat people as traffic tools? If in this drama, the characters are just functional keys for worshiping money, antagonizing, and hating the rich, and the relationships between the characters are just the fuel to create a sense of pleasure, then people are being treated as consumables. His purpose is also to consume people, so we need to be vigilant.
The State Administration of Radio and Television stated that it will further implement the "Excellent Micro-Short Drama Creation and Communication Plan" and enhance the cultural connotation, artistic quality and social value of micro-short dramas through mechanisms such as financial support, creative guidance, literary criticism, and organizational communication.
