On Monday, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) vowed to combat content that contains “malicious incitement of conflict” and “negative outlooks on life such as world-weariness.” Beijing requires social media companies to moderate content on their platforms, with posts strictly controlled to avoid anything considered to be too subversive, vulgar, pornographic, or generally harmful.
Earlier this month, the CAC had already announced penalties against three popular digital platforms—micro-blogging platform Weibo, short video app Kuaishou, and Instagram-like Xiaohongshu—for allegedly neglecting their content management duties. Authorities have not specified what punitive actions are being taken against those platforms.
On Tuesday, the CAC stated that measures taken against the news aggregator app Toutiao included “summoning the company for a meeting, ordering rectification within a specified time limit, issuing a warning, and strictly dealing with those responsible.” The statement said the platform had failed to fulfill its primary responsibility of managing information content and allowed “harmful content” to appear on the main section of its trending search list, “thereby damaging the online ecosystem.” It did not provide further details about the specific content or the punishments. The CAC added that “Internet regulators will continue to focus on prominent illegal and non-compliant activities that undermine the online ecosystem.”
In a separate statement on Tuesday, the CAC said it would take similar measures against UCWeb after the Alibaba-owned platform displayed entries related to “extremely sensitive and malicious” events and topics such as “online violence and the privacy of minors.” The two-month campaign announced by the CAC aims “to regulate the malicious incitement of conflict and the promotion of violence and vicious currents,” the statement said. The list of specific online issues authorities hope to tackle in the crackdown includes “exploiting social hot spots to forcibly associate identity, region or gender with other information, stigmatizing and hyping them.”
