Chinese social media platform Weibo Corp has just been fined 3 million yuan (approximately 600,000 euros) by China’s Internet regulator for repeatedly posting misleading and illegal information in recent months.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC for its acronym in English) has assured that the popular social network Weibo has violated an important cybersecurity regulation on the protection of minors, as well as other laws, although it did not give more details about the alleged irregularities of the tech giant. He also assured that the local cyberspace regulator in Beijing had imposed 44 sanctions on Weibo for a total of 14.3 million yuan (more than two million euros) only until last November.
Serious problems for Chinese Twitter
The company, which manages this platform, which is very similar to Twitter that we usually use in the West, was ordered to “immediately rectify and seriously punish the people responsible for the serious acts of manipulation in which the company has been involved. “, said the CAC in a statement released in several media outlets in the country.
For its part, Weibo defended itself through another statement issued just a few hours later, in which it stated that it accepted “with total resignation the criticisms leveled” by the government and the country’s authorities and has appointed a working group in response to the sanction imposed .
A much more ‘civilized’ internet
The newly released fine is the latest in a series of sanctions the regulator has imposed on tech companies throughout the past year, and comes at a time when Chinese government oversight of the internet is tighter than ever. ever, considering that the Internet is already strictly censored. Still, the Communist Party has issued new mandatory guidelines for news websites and social networks like Weibo. The justification offered by the authorities in the face of such control of activity on the Internet is that they intend to achieve a “civilized” Internet throughout the country, without a doubt the one with the most Internet users on the planet.
These efforts by Chinese government authorities include an outright crackdown on “troll and fan culture” online, and a ban on social media companies aggressively promoting Western celebrities or footballers, claiming they are a a bad influence on the youngest, since totally counterrevolutionary conduct could germinate in them.
At the end of last year, the Cyberspace Administration of China also fined Douban, a very popular web portal in the Asian country to watch, comment and rate movies, with 1.5 million yuan (around 300,000 euros) for what the Chinese authorities understood as “illegal disclosure of information”, since the country has serious reluctance when it comes to disseminating Western content.
