China’s official state news agency published an editorial Tuesday calling for a clampdown on the spread of “toxic rumors” by users of the country’s popular Twitter-like websites, just days after the administrators of one such website temporarily suspended the accounts of several users for spreading what was deemed as unfounded rumors.
The development, while not unexpected, directs attention to the tightrope that Chinese authorities are walking as they try to foster Web innovations at the same time as they try to maintain a tight grip on the flow of information in their society. But comprehensive censorship is likely an exercise in futility, given how fast Chinese microblogs are growing and how quickly information spreads through them.
The editorial, which was published on the Chinese-language website of state-run news agency Xinhua, said “Concocting rumors is itself a social malady, and the spread of rumors across the Internet presents a massive social threat,” according to a translation by Reuters.
The editorial also called upon the administrators of said websites to be “stronger” in “fundamentally eradicating the soil in which rumors sprout.”
Reuters points out that while the editorial is not an official policy directive, it does highlight an increased effort by the government to censor popular micrblogs, known inside the country as “Weibo” (pronounced “Way-bore”), at a critical point in their growth.
The two most popular Weibo, Tencent Weibo (233 million) and Sina Weibo (140-200 million), were only launched in 2010 and 2009, respectively. By contrast, it took Twitter five years to reach 200 million users.
Microblogging, like the web itself, is more popular throughout China than any other country in the world. Young, digitally-savvy Chinese rely on Weibo websites not only to express themselves but also for reading and publishing news critical of the government.
The Chinese government openly recognizes the value of having a wired populace in a globalized world, and promoting homegrown innovation of web companies, particular social media websites such as Weibos are an intergal part of that effort.
But now that the microblogs have reached a critical mass, the state has been increasingly forced to attempt something resembling a balancing act between promoting innovation and maintaining its suppression of dissent.
On Aug. 26, Chinese company Sina announced in a message sent to all its Weibo users that it was suspending several of their accounts for one month for posting messages it said contained false information, The New York Times reported. As the Times also observed, Sina Weibo users openly criticized the move:
Some Weibo users sardonically applauded the suspensions, writing that the notices of them spread the rumors more effectively than the original bloggers.”I didn’t know about the story till now. How tragic!” one blogger wrote. Others expressed outrage. “How does Weibo know what’s true or not?” one user wrote. “Who gives Weibo the right to silence its users?”
That came just three days after a top Chinese government official, Liu Quo, secretary of Beijing and member of the China’s governing politburo, visited Sina headquarters and called upon the company to do more to stamp out so-called false information.
Currently, the country’s Weibos already censor information in coordination with the government and delete posts that they deem erroneous or offensive. (China also blocks Twitter and Facebook and on the Chinese mainland, the entire internet is censored by the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” a broad, state-run firewall.)
That hasn’t stopped Weibo users from skirting the censors, however. After a collision between two high speed rail trains in the Zhejiang Province killed upwards of 35 people in July, users on Sina Weibo were posting so many critical messages about the government that the censors couldn’t keep up, The Times reported. This despite the fact that Sina Weibo might have attempted to control its own “trending topics” to downplay the crash.
Earlier in the month, Weibo users spread the news of an official’s death – which was denied by the government – by altering his name and using synonyms to evade the censors, Reuters reported.
And in June, a Chinese official was caught in his own Weiner-esque scandal Sina Weibo after sending several women explicit messages and photos in what he thought were private messages but were actually public postings on the website.
And then there are numerous work-arounds that crop up periodically allowing users to access banned websites including Twitter.
So as much as China might want to control the growth of its microblogs, it is unlikely it can manage to ever completely stop users from posting what they may. In fact, the realtime pace of the blogs and the sheer volume of posts being created, particularly as the number of users grows, makes the government’s ultimate desires of a rumor-free or false-information-free Weibo nearly unfathomable.
As any good Twitter user will tell you, there are few things that the microblogging platform spreads quicker than false information.
