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.

The contest runs all month long until June 2. The evaluation is evenly spread between the creativity and quality of the video and the outcome in views and engagement.

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? Dr. Lloyd I. Sederer, a psychiatrist, a public health doctor, and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, says yes.

“What it can do and has done is reduced isolation,” he said in a radio interview posted on his blog. He said the benefit was especially so during the COVID-19 lockdowns because “it denies us essential need, which is time with other people, and with youth with their friends. Hardly anything could be more important.

“When it’s working well, a person who’s part of it has the experience of ‘I am not alone … I’m not the only one with this or that thinking, this or that. I’m part of a community,’” Sederer added. “And in that respect, it’s a channel for self-expression, like the journal might be, only more public.”

The benefits, however, need to be weighed against the drawbacks. In the interview, he mentioned the harms of visual content triggering competition, envy, and self-criticism and that social media could be as addictive as drugs.

In that context, exposure to social media—the equivalence to dose in drug addictions—is an important factor, said Sederer.

Enter Gan Jing World.

“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.”

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.

“A social community beat the power of drugs,” wrote Sederer in a related article in Psychiatric Times.

Janicki echoed: “The opposite of addiction is connection. It’s relationships.”

“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.