The Chinese Communist Party wiped out 10,000 accounts over the past three weeks across multiple popular social media services to suppress dissent and enforce the Communist Party line, the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.

The affected accounts reportedly ranged from popular celebrities to average citizens across all of the top Chinese social media platforms, including Weibo, Tencent, NetEase, and Baidu, along with news aggregation sites like Toutiao and Sohu. 

China’s Cyberspace Administration said the banned accounts “trampled on the dignity of laws and regulations and damaged the ecology of online public opinion” by “spreading harmful political information, maliciously tampering with the history of the Communist Party and smearing the reputation of heroes and China.”

“Some challenged the moral bottom line of society and damaged the healthy growth of the majority of youngsters by spreading vulgar pornography and violating good social customs,” the censorship agency added.

Weibo and WeChat have been trying to play ball with Beijing by banning some hugely popular accounts on their own because the users were allegedly spreading “harmful political information” and pornography. Apparently, those efforts were not good enough because representatives from the two companies were summoned by the Cyberspace Administration on Monday to give them “serious warnings” about their “irresponsibility and lax management.”

(Read more)


You may also like

There is something wrong with Feed URL