China waging war on online porn, rumors
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E-mail Xinhua, April 18, 2014
China's war against online crimes including disseminating rumors and pornography has stepped up recently.
A Beijing court on Thursday gave Internet rumormonger Qin Zhihui, known online as "Qinhuohuo," a three-year jail term for defaming celebrities and the government.
Earlier in the week, Charles Xue, also known as Xue Manzi to his 12 million followers on Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter clone, apologized to the public for spreading online rumors.
Xue was arrested in October on charges of having had group sex with prostitutes and "instigating disturbances," a term used to refer to online rumormongering. But he was released on bail after suffering a "serious illness," Beijing police said on Wednesday.
The repentance of both Qin and Xue holds great significance in the context of booming Chinese cyberspace. The number of Chinese netizens has exceeded 610 million. There are 143.9 million active users of microblogging platform Sina Weibo, and more than 300 million users of Weixin, or WeChat, which allows people to send text, photos, videos and voice messages over mobile phones.
While the public enjoys faster communication and more platforms to voice opinions on issues ranging from pollution to official corruption, the government is working to curb the pervasiveness of online rumors, as some star bloggers, or "big Vs," are using their influence for personal gain, impacting society and harming social order.
This is a war China cannot afford to lose.
Shut down "Restaurants"
Experts have said China's crackdown on rumors is necessary to preserve social stability and poured scorn on Western media claims that the government is using the campaign as a pretext to limit freedom of speech.
Launching a website or opening a Weibo account is like running a restaurant; if you provide poisonous food to the public, your restaurant must be shut down, said Wang Zhongwu, a professor with Shandong University.
He described the online environment as good mingling with bad and said the trend of negativity was "worrisome and hateful."
In his apology, Xue said he used to issue 80 posts via Weibo every day and received more than 100,000 comments on a daily basis. "With so many followers, I felt like a king looking after state affairs," he explained.
Xue said companies or places would soon benefit after his "recommendations." He also posted advertisements to make money and retweeted unverified information later proven to be rumors.
One particular pernicious claim by Xue that tuna and hairtail were causing high mercury levels in the water of east China's Zhoushan City caused dire consequences for the fishery industry in Zhoushan.
Meanwhile, Qin Zhihui was described by netizens as "using rumors to overturn China."
He invented a story that the Chinese government gave 200 million yuan (32.5 million U.S. dollars) in compensation to the family of a foreign passenger killed in a high-speed train crash in 2011.
The post was retweeted 11,000 times and got 3,300 comments, sparking erroneous fury about the government treating foreigners and Chinese unequally in the aftermath of the crash.
Qin also ran a "black PR" firm, taking money from companies to post online comments discrediting rivals.
Besides rumors, the spread of pornography online has also worried parents and educators as youths comprise the bulk of netizens.
Lyu Yang, who works in a media organization in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, was shocked to see pornography in a search engine on her son's mobile phone.
"My son said his classmates visited these websites at evening classes," Lyu said. "It is essential for the government to shut down these web portals."
Web porn has disrupted social order and tainted the image of China as a whole, casting a bad influence on minors and even threatening their personal security, said Li Weihong, vice minister of education. "Some teenagers have committed crimes due to the influence of porn. It is a severe lesson we must learn."
Who to trust?
Contributing to the harmfulness of online rumormongering in China is the fact this has become a profit-making industry here, which is less the case in other countries, said Yu Zhigang, a professor with the China University of Political Science and Law.
"In the past two or three years, there seems to have been nothing we can trust," he said, warning that the increasing spread of rumors could impact morality and values, harm social order and even cause unrest.
Sometimes the effects on national interests are difficult to erase even if the rumors are eventually proven to be groundless, Yu pointed out.
In September, as authorities announced a regulation specifying conditions for defamation charges, an editorial in Communist Party of China journal Qiushi criticized the abuse of cyberspace's freedom seen in the trend for wanton defamation attacking the Party and the government.
"The Internet is full of all kinds of negative news and critical voices saying the government only does bad things and everything it says is wrong," said the editorial.
The more a voice opposes the mainstream, the more it would win applause. Meanwhile, rational and positive voices are often hounded out of cyberspace, according to the article.
It called on big Vs and commercial websites to stay alert, remember their social responsibility, observe professional ethics and offer genuine, comprehensive and objective information to the public.
Crackdown
When the Internet cleaning campaign was launched early last year, officials told popular bloggers to "promote virtues" and "uphold law" online.
Then in September, authorities announced a regulation that Internet users can be charged with defamation and face three years in prison if their postings containing rumors are read by 5,000 users or reposted more than 500 times.
The government is also expected to strengthen supervision and management of Weixin accounts applied on people's mobile phones.
Earlier this month, China launched an anti-porn initiative called "Cleaning the Web 2014." The cyberspace raid will involve checks on websites, search engines, mobile application stores, Internet TV USB sticks and set-top boxes, authorities said.
Bu Xiting, an official at the Communication University of China, sees the campaign as a sign of the government's determination to create a healthy cyberspace and step toward the rule of law in the virtual world.
For Shen Yang, an information technology professor with Wuhan University, the key to winning the war against depraved online content is to promote voices featuring "positive energy." Suggested measures include opening more government Weibo accounts to provide useful, professional and high-quality information concerning people's daily lives so as to squeeze the space for rumormongering.
The government should also cooperate with traditional and social media to establish an emergency response mechanism to tackle online crimes which would impact social stability, according to the academic.
The whole of society should unite to bolster positive cyber culture to counter the negativity, he said. "It is a war we cannot lose, because the price for the nation and generations to come will be very high."
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