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China’s cyberspace watchdog presses internet platforms to vet their online content as crackdown deepens
- New guidelines emphasise that China’s online platforms are responsible for managing their content and urges them to improve their censorship
- It is the latest move by Beijing in its drive to create a ‘clean and healthy’ cyberspace, free from information it deems harmful to society
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China’s top cyberspace watchdog has ordered internet platforms to weed out and censor “unhealthy” content in its latest squeeze on Big Tech.
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Guidelines issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) on Wednesday emphasised that online platforms are responsible for managing their content, and told them to enhance both their self-censorship and the censorship of content generated by their legions of users.
It is part of Beijing’s drive to create a “clean and healthy” cyberspace, free from information it deems harmful to society, which has recently come to include apolitical content such as stock market analysis and celebrity gossip.
Tencent Holdings, one of the country’s biggest technology behemoths, was quick to show it was complying with the new directive, purging thousands of independent financial news accounts from its popular WeChat platform.
The so-called Great Firewall already prevents Chinese internet users from accessing global giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, as well as the websites of foreign media organisations. China’s internet regulators have now turned their attention to cleansing domestic online content.
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The CAC said the new guideline “aims at further ensuring that internet platforms are the primary entities responsible for content management” and that they are “the first ones responsible for content management”.
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