It is well known that the Chinese Internet is heavily controlled by the government. The term Virtual Great Wall is no coincidence: Beijing has implemented a shield to monitor and censor online activity; and this control could soon be even stricter.
All types of comments concerned
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), an agency that regulates the Internet in the Middle Kingdom, has indeed announced a new law requiring that all comments written on the Internet be approved before they are published. The text is an update of a 2017 law, which defined a censorship practice used by certain platforms like Weibo, the equivalent of Twitter, to examine content before it is even published.
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However, it was only used for accounts that have previously violated content censorship policies, or when a heated discussion on a sensitive topic was in progress. Above all, this practice limited these actions to “ comments under news information “, a restriction that has just been removed, reports the MIT Technology Review.
Thus, the CAC plans to oblige publishers, whether social networks, media or creators, to recruit “ a review and editing team commensurate with the scope of services which will be required to review each comment prior to posting and, if it detects any “ illegal and bad information », to report them to the administration.
This applies to all types of comments: forum posts, replies, messages left on public bulletin boards or bullet cats , an innovative method used by video platforms in China to display real-time comments on top of a video. All formats including texts, symbols, GIFs, images, sounds and videos are targeted.
A very strict containment has been applied in Shanghai, causing many Chinese to complain online. Photography: Hanny Naibaho / Unsplash
Sometimes blurry text
For now, the text is rather vague on the implementation of the new policy. Billions of comments are posted on the Chinese web every day. Applying such a measure would put enormous pressure on the platforms and force them to drastically increase the number of people they employ to carry out censorship, especially since Chinese social networks already apply very strict censorship. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, for example, employs thousands of content editors, who make up the company’s largest workforce.
For the time being, it is not known whether the government intends to apply this measure immediately. ” The proposed revisions primarily consist of updating the current version of the Comment Rules to bring them into line with the language and policies of newer authority, such as new privacy laws, data security and general content regulations says Jeremy Daum, senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School.
If the Chinese authorities assure that these new regulations aim to make the Internet of the country safer and to better represent the interests of the citizens, its motivations seem more murky than that.
The Chinese authorities undermined by the confinements?
Recently, several compromising comments have been posted under government account posts on Weibo, such as pointing out government lies or dismissing the official narrative. Indeed, the very strict confinement applied by the authorities in Shanghai has created tensions within the country. As reported The Registermost movement was restricted for weeks and residents received often modest food parcels.
The duration and severity of the confinements have thus led many citizens to complain online. Some citizens were also forcibly transferred to field hospitals and some domestic animals were even killed. If the Internet is very controlled in the country, it is still possible to exchange freely in some places, this legislation would put an end to that.
In addition, the fact that problematic comments will have to be denounced suggests that sanctions could subsequently be put in place against their authors, whose first and last names will also have to be reported to the administration. According to Jeremy Daum, the most recent changes are ” unambiguously as part of China’s continued expansion of content regulation beyond traditional media to now cover user-generated content through comments and other interactive features “.