Sina suspends apps for a month after reprimand by Beijing regulator for failure to moderate content
- Beijing regulator says that Sina has violated the country’s internet regulations by spreading untrue and vulgar information
Chinese internet major Sina Corp has voluntarily suspended its flagship news app and other products after it was summoned by China’s internet authority for not doing a good enough job to moderate unsuitable content.
The Beijing Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission said in a post on its official WeChat account on Wednesday that Sina had violated the country’s internet regulations by spreading untrue and vulgar information, and for being a “bad influence” on public opinion.
The regulator, citing an unnamed Sina executive, said the company would suspend its desktop-based Sina blog platform and remove its Sina News app and Sina Blog app for a month to make rectifications, effective from 3pm on Wednesday. The suspension would be one of the longest in China’s internet history for rectification purposes.
The share price of the Nasdaq-listed Sina dropped nearly 6 per cent to US$60 in pre-market trading on Wednesday.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping the ruling Communist Party has tightened its grip on the internet and there has been an ongoing drive to crack down on content deemed unsuitable by the authorities, including pornography, gambling, fake news and political dissent. This has been intensified amid the growing popularity of new social media platforms such as live-streaming, short videos and microblogs.
Sina also runs the Twitter-like Weibo, which is one of the biggest social media platforms in China. The regulator’s statement did not mention Weibo.
To create a “clean cyberspace”, China’s internet authorities have shut down thousands of apps and millions of social media accounts, forcing companies to shoulder the task of moderating and censoring content that appears on their own platforms.
“China’s social media censorship is operated through a system of ’self-regulation’ where companies are held liable for content on their platforms. Government regulators don’t hand out a central list of keywords but rather it is companies and now even individual users who have the responsibility to guesstimate what are taboo topics,” said Lotus Ruan, a researcher at The Citizen Lab with the University of Toronto. “You never know where the red line is until you cross it; the red line can change arbitrarily as the government sees fit.”
“In our research, we often see self-censorship and over-censorship on Chinese social media including live-streaming platforms and even mobiles games,” said Ruan in a recent interview. “We found that censorship is often aimed at cracking down on political content such as government criticism, collective action, and discussion of Party leaders rather than purely targeting violent and hate-filled content.”
