China’s Self-Driving Rules

Reuters is reporting that China has laid out national guidelines for testing self-driving cars, and cites its source as the China Daily newspaper.

The rules indicate that vehicles must first be tested in non-public zones, that road tests can only be on designated streets, and that a qualified person must always sit in the driver’s position, ready to take over control.

Autonomous vehicles have become a “key plank” in Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” push.

In other Chinese Internet-related news, China’s rough equivalent to Twitter, Sina Weibo, reversed itself earlier today of an edict to ban gay content, according to a report from CNBC.

On Friday, Weibo announced plans to remove posts containing pornographic cartoons, videos that promote violence, homosexual content, and violent video games, arguing that it was making these moves to comply with Chinese law.

But over the weekend, Weibo endured a major backlash from Weibo users, and in a post from today the company said it would no longer target “homosexual content” (but would continue forward cleaning up pornographic and violent posts).

CNBC’s story points out that homosexuality was decriminalized in China in 1997, and “later removed from an official list of mental illnesses.”

Comey’s Ratings

So who watched that Jim Comey interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last evening?

Closed to 10 million people, apparently.

I won’t even come close to wading into the politics, but from a media perspective, the Hollywood Reporter made some interesting observations about the ratings and the matchups.

From my perspective, it was a bold move for ABC to put this interview in a time slot that was competing against the Academy of Country Music Awards show. Then again, there might be some Red State, Blue State (Deep State?) method to that madness.

The hour-long interview (well, hour-long, save for what seemed like 25 minutes of commercials) averaged 9.8 million viewers with a 2.4 rating in the news demo for adults 25-54 for the network.

But the ACMA still won the night, averaging 12.1 million viewers.

And let’s not forget Stephanopoulos and Comey were also competing with AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and Showtimes “Billions.” It was a rough night all around!

Anderson Cooper’s “60 Minutes” interview with Stormy Daniels on March 25th way outpaced the Comey Q&A 2:1, pulling in 22 million viewers (according to Nielsen).

To put all those numbers in some perspective, this year’s Super Bowl, which reached a seven-year low in terms of ratings, had viewership of 111.3 million and a 37.1 rating.

As for Comey’s book, it goes on sale tomorrow and currently sits atop the Amazon Kindle list of the Top 100 Paid books list.