The Cyberspace Administration of China is taking another step toward censoring and controlling the media, now threatening to crack down on news outlets that spread their reports through social media.
In this day and age, social media has come to play an important part in our daily lives, whether it serves as a venue to communicate with people, watch entertaining content, get the latest news or something else.
The Chinese government, however, is keen on keeping news outlets from posting reports using information on social media and those who don't obey will be punished. The government says the crackdown aims to stop false news from spreading over social media.
While that sounds reasonable, many see this move as yet another way for the Chinese government to censor what it doesn't like and to control public opinion.
As The New York Times reports, the subjects of the targeted news reports have some things in common, such as the poor quality of living conditions, the decaying moral standards in northeastern China villages and the arson on a bus in the Hunan Province capital of Changsha. At a glance, these reports seem to portray the ugly side of China, which the government would not wish to promote.
In a statement, the Cyberspace Administration of China highlighted that websites are "strictly forbidden" from spreading news reports without specifying the source or, even worse, falsifying the sources. It's also forbidden to create news based on hearsay, or distort the facts based on conjecture and imagination.
The government is poised to continue its crackdown and punish more websites and news outlets that report unverified content found online, on various platforms such as social media, and peg it as news. The Cyberspace Administration says it already punished a number of Chinese websites, but did not offer any details regarding what exactly that punishment entails.
Moreover, the South China Morning Post reports that online news outlets may only report news found on social media if they get approval from the government first.
Censorship is far from being a new thing in China, but it seems to be gaining new dimensions with this new crackdown on news outlets. Chinese users have long been trying to bypass the government's censorship on the internet through various means such as VPNs or tools such as the Tor browser, mainly to access social media platforms and various online services offered by Google sites.
