Sina Weibo Punishes 103,673 Accounts For Violating Government Rules
China’s Twitter, Sina Weibo, “closed or in some way punished” a whopping 103,673 accounts on the social media network for not being in compliance with the government’s online discourse rules, Tech in Asia reports.
Looks like suppression of online speech is alive and well in China.
The rules are titled Seven Bottom Lines. They include: the legal bottom line, the socialist system bottom line, the national interest bottom line, the legitimate interest of citizens bottom line, the public order bottom line, the moral bottom line, and the authenticity of information bottom line.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the punished 100,000+ accounts were found guilty of publishing personal attacks, false information, plagiarism, and/or the distribution of smut.
Tech in Asia writes,
“It’s likely that many of those punished had been spreading political rumors – or perhaps even legitimate news that was deemed too sensitive for the nation’s severely locked-down media landscape.”
Sina Weibo was recently valued at $6 billion, and isn’t slowing down, having expanded to Singapore and Indonesia in September.
Many Western celebrities are present on Sina Weibo as well – Robert Downey Jr., NBA star Dwyane Wade, Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder, Tyra Banks, Selena Gomez, Maroon 5’s Adam Levine and Paris Hilton, to name a few.
Should Sina Weibo get away with its recent large-scale crackdown?
(Source: Tech in Asia. Sina Weibo image via ft.com.)
