In Toutiao’s case, one of the accounts that were suspended this week had posted a saucy video of a woman in a short skirt. It got 57,000 views. Another suspended account had recently put up a post titled “The World’s Ugliest Celebrities, Michael Jackson Is Ranked First, You Won’t Want to Eat After Reading This.”

“Once you have more people watching, then you want to be more cautious,” Wei-Ying Ma, who heads Toutiao’s artificial intelligence lab, told a conference in Beijing last month.

As Toutiao’s popularity has skyrocketed, Bytedance has become a darling of Silicon Valley investors such as Sequoia Capital. The company, which is currently valued at $20 billion, has been in talks with existing backers to raise new financing that would value the company at more than $30 billion, according to a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are not public.

That price tag would make Bytedance among the most valuable privately held technology companies in the world, not just in China. Airbnb is said to be valued at around $30 billion. SpaceX, the rocket maker founded by Elon Musk, is valued at $21 billion.

Bytedance has big plans for overseas expansion, too. It recently spent between $800 million and $1 billion to purchase Musical.ly, a video-based social network popular with teenagers in the United States and Europe. At the Beijing conference last month, a top Bytedance executive, Liu Zhen, said the company hoped to be earning half its revenue from outside China within the next five years.

Jinri Toutiao, whose name means “today’s headlines” in Chinese and is pronounced JING-er TOE-tee-yow, aggregates content from various sources and looks much like Facebook’s newsfeed. But instead of displaying articles and videos based on what your friends have shared, the app does so based on what you have previously read and watched on the app.

If you click on articles about iPhones, then Toutiao will feed you more tech coverage. After you watch a few cooking videos, the app will fetch you more clips of people wrapping dumplings and braising chicken’s feet.