Video Contest Marks New Platform’s Latest Effort to Make Social Media Work for Communities

Gan Jing World.

Gan Jing World, a new social media platform, has launched a Mother’s Day short video contest with up to $1,000 in prizes. The event marks the technology company’s first contest and latest campaign to forge a social community of kindness.

Gan Jing means “clean.” Its official website says that the name reflects Gan Jing’s mission to create an online entertainment community “free from violent, erotic, criminal, and harmful content.” Due to their experience of escaping communist persecution in China, Gan Jing’s engineers want to build a platform with morality at its core, according to Nick Janicki, director of media relations of the technology company.

Gan Jing World's Mother's Day video awards. Courtesy of Gan Jing World

Make Social Media Work for Communities

Nowadays, social media has some pretty negative publicity, ranging from taking users to near-infinite addiction loops, infringing users’ private data, to providing a fertile environment for online predators to prey on youths.

Does social media have anything good to offer? Gan Jing World thinks so; it is trying to make it work for communities by providing a clean environment.

“So the key is, even if you go down an addiction path with something that isn’t helping you, at the very least, it’s not harming you. And that’s the worst-case scenario,” Janicki told The Epoch Times.

“The worst-case scenario is that you could literally be addicted to violence, or pornography, or hate, or form a micro group within a mindset, where now you’re super polarized,” he added.

“Even if you go on a downward spiral in Gan Jing World, the worst case is that you don’t improve. But the worst case now with everything else is to actually degrade.”

‘Rat Park’: Power of Connection

Janicki cited a famous “Rat Park” experiment to emphasize the importance of a social community.

“Rat Park” is a series of experiments conducted by American psychologist Bruce Alexander. Before “Rat Park,” researchers had shown that rats placed in single cages chose drug-laced water over drug-free water. They drank drugged water repeatedly until they died of overdosing.

Alexander, however, wondered if that outcome had anything to do with factors aside from drugs, for example, the setting the rats were in. Therefore, he compared two groups: isolated rats and large colony rats. The rats were offered the same types of water. Those in “rat parks” still drank the drug-laced water but didn’t do it obsessively.

“The opposite of addiction is connection. It’s relationships,” said Janicki.

“So no matter what, as humanity, we have to have technology for good; we have to have AI [artificial intelligence] for good. Everything we do has to be for the benefit and the morality of humanity,” he added, referring to the underlying business philosophy of Gan Jing. “So that’s the starting point of everything as we’re building this out, basically.”

He said the latest Mother’s Day video contest would be one of the many Gan Jing efforts to boost a social community for kindness.