Earlier this month, China girded up for a renewed fight against that sneaky opponent called the online rumour monger. An opponent which, according to the venerable state media, is strong enough to bring down the even more venerable Chinese government and in the process dismantle the most venerable Communist Party of China (CPC) cadre by cadre and unstitch thread by each socialist thread, the fibre of the people’s republic.
The fight against the ever evasive rumour mongers will be led by a new platform launched by six Chinese websites including search engine Baidu and very popular Sina Weibo.
This new platform of the online righteous will “collect statements Twitter-like services, news portals and China’s biggest search engine, Baidu, to refute online rumors and expose the scams of phishing websites,” state media said.
Work has already begun in earnest.
“It (the platform) has collected about 100,000 brief statements on online rumors and phishing websites and offered Internet users about 30 websites through which they can report online rumors or scams. Operators of the platform will spend another year finishing the second phase. Once that is complete, more entertaining and interactive programs will be introduced to encourage the public to report online rumors,” the state media report said.
The platform was launched now but as early as May there were indications that the Chinese government was not happy about the “unclean” way the Internet was operating here.
China’s State Internet Information Office (SIIO) had said in May that it is “waging a war” – yes, nothing less than waging a war — against rumours spreading online as they “have impaired the credibility of online media, disrupted normal communication order, and aroused great aversion among the public.”
The “great aversion among the public” part-of-the-statement might have been called propaganda – as opposed to a rumour – by some.
“An extreme minority of netizens had been spreading various rumors online, with some slandering others with fabricated pictures and some deliberately spreading rumors under the pretext of seeking others’ help to dispel these rumors,” the SIIO statement had said.
China boasts of an every growing number of people using the Internet – it’s nearing the 600 million mark – but the massive volume of online information readily available often triggers numbing headaches for the government and the CPC.
The government, of course, has launched “clean up the Internet” programs before. In late March last year, for example, two major microblogging platforms were hauled up after rumours of a coup in Beijing spread amid speculation about a power struggle within the top CPC leaders following the sacking of top Communist Party official Bo Xilai.
All the big names of the state-run media had then run editorials saying how important it was for those using social networking platforms to register with their real names.
Some China watchers have questioned the government’s efforts to tighten Internet control even more. They have interpreted the moves as an effort to bring under control the Twitter-like Weibo services.
For example, the state media gave the example of the massive one-day downpour in Beijing on July 21 last year. “Soon after downpours hit Beijing on July 21, 2012, Internet users began disseminating photos of severe flooding that had been taken years earlier,” the report said.
It forgot to mention that initially the authorities were given an abysmally low statistics of how many people had died that day. Only after citizen angry overflowed on the Internet, the actually figure jumped to 77.
A recent commentary in Xinhua in Chinese said microbloggers were involved in passing around rumours that were painting the picture of China’s collapse.
“Every day microbloggers and their mentors in the same cause pass rumors, fabricate negative news about [China’s] society, create an apocalyptic vision of China’s imminent collapse, and denigrate the existing socialist system — all to promote the European and American model of capitalism and constitutionalism,” wrote commenatator Wang Xiaoshi. He argued that those using social media were embracing values that led to the collapse of the USSR.
So, further tightening of social media – at least what is deemed as rumours on them – should not come as a shock.