Tencent’s opinion blog Dajia is shut down amid moves to tighten control over coronavirus critics
- The official WeChat account of opinions blog Dajia was removed on Wednesday and its homepage is unavailable
An opinion blog run by internet giant Tencent Holdings has been closed abruptly, sparking speculation that it has run afoul of Beijing’s tightened control of social media amid recent public criticism of government attempts to contain the spread of the coronavirus in China.
The official WeChat account of Dajia, which has published opinion pieces on social issues by some of the country’s leading intellectuals and independent thinkers since its inception in 2012, was removed on Wednesday and its homepage was unavailable.
A Tencent spokesman declined to comment on the matter.
The sudden shutdown comes amid an ongoing “clean-up” of online content in China, as Beijing moves to tighten its grip on the flow of information, after an early flurry of public criticism breached the country’s strong censorship controls.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced earlier this month that it had punished a range of platforms and publishers for content it deemed unsuitable and misleading. CAC said it “supervised and guided” companies including Sina, Tencent and ByteDance – owners of the country’s most popular social platforms Weibo, WeChat and Douyin/TikTok respectively.
The CAC said it had also punished a number of individual accounts for “reporting against regulations” and spreading false information, without elaborating.