China\u2019s top internet regulator announced on Monday a sweeping two-month crackdown on social media, vowing to combat content containing \u201cmalicious incitement of conflict\u201d and \u201cnegative outlooks on life such as world-weariness\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beijing requires social media companies to moderate content on their platforms, with posts strictly controlled to avoid anything deemed to be too subversive, vulgar, pornographic or generally harmful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The notice from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) follows announcements of penalties this month against three popular digital platforms, which it said had neglected content management duties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Saturday, the CAC said it would carry out \u201cdisciplinary and punitive measures\u201d against micro-blogging platform Weibo and short video platform Kuaishou, accusing them of highlighting celebrity news and \u201cundesirable\u201d content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The announcement followed similar action<\/a> taken by the CAC on September 11 against the Instagram-like Xiaohongshu, known as Rednote<\/a> in English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Authorities have not specified what punitive actions are being taken against the three platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two-month campaign \u2014 whose start date was not specified in Monday\u2019s statement \u2014 aims \u201cto regulate the malicious incitement of conflict and the promotion of violence and vicious currents\u201d, the CAC said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The statement then listed specific online issues authorities hope to tackle in the crackdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They include \u201cexploiting social hot spots to forcibly associate identity, region or gender with other information, stigmatising and hyping them\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In practice, this could mean a clampdown on posts about discrimination. In July, local officials in eastern Zhejiang province warned comedians against stirring up gender discord through stand-up routines that joked about the battle of the sexes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other problems targeted by the campaign include disseminating \u201crumours\u201d about the economy, finance, social welfare and public policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weibo has previously warned against posting \u201cpessimistic\u201d views about the economy, social media users told AFP<\/em> in late 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Monday\u2019s notice also mentioned \u201cmaliciously interpreting social phenomena, unilaterally exaggerating negative individual cases and exploiting them to promote negative outlooks on life such as world-weariness\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That could be seen as a reference to \u201clying flat\u201d or \u201cletting it rot\u201d culture widespread phrases used by young Chinese to describe lifestyles that snub gruelling work culture in favour of taking it easy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The crackdown aims to \u201cfoster a more civilised and rational online environment\u201d, the statement said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China\u2019s top internet regulator announced on Monday a sweeping two-month crackdown on social media, vowing to combat content containing \u201cmalicious incitement of conflict\u201d and \u201cnegative outlooks on life such as world-weariness\u201d. Beijing requires social media companies to moderate content on their platforms, with posts strictly controlled to avoid anything deemed to be too subversive, vulgar, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_3859443944190656_828796993651875":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4954","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sci-tec"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4954"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4956,"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954\/revisions\/4956"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paksouch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}