Bilibili to add 1,000 content reviewers after employee death sparks overwork conversations

Bilibili said on its Weibo account that it would hire an extra 1,000 content reviewers to share the workload of its content auditing team. The news comes as the platform comes under scrutiny for the death of an employee, which led to allegations of overworking its employees. 

Bilibili which is a video platforms company backed by Alibaba came under scrutiny as a user spoke out about the death of the employee. According to the Global Times, the influencer Wang Luo Bei claimed in a post that some netizens had shown him evidence that Bilibili had tampered the worker's overtime record, who passed away lately. He also claimed that the company had refused to admit its actions. Aside from doubting Bilibili's denial, Wang Luo Bei also claimed that he had received a letter from the company's attorney.

However, not long after Wang apologised for publishing incorrect information about the sudden death of an employee and said in separate post that he had decided to stop following the incident because he understood that Bilibili was solving the incident by directly dealing with the employee's family. He also apologised for releasing inaccurate information.

While the company earlier denied earlier that the death of the employee was caused by working overtime, it has now elaborated that the content auditing team needed to work during Chinese New Year as it was similar to other public services. To prevent a similar incident from happening again, Bilibili said it will require members of the content auditing team to have a check-up every month. Additionally, the company will offer health counseling services to protect employees' health.

According to SCMP, Bilibili sent an internal letter to its employees, sharing the news of an employee working in the photo and text auditing department of the content security centre, the in-house unit which monitors content uploaded by users, passing away last Friday.

The Global Times said according to a recruitment advertisement posted on major job sites, employees in Bilibili's audit team need to work 12 hours and should "be able to accept night shift arrangements." Other media also reported that before the employee’s death, he had worked the standard hours — eight hours a day, five days a week. The company tripled his pay for working during China New Year, according to the law.