Chinese authorities have sanctioned several social networks in the country for disclosing “harmful information” and failing to comply with “obligations to manage information published by users”, said the agency for the Cyberspace Administration of China today.
At issue are contents related to “pornography, gambling, superstitions and prostitution”, with sanctions having been applied in the first quarter of 2023 to the social networks Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, which is blocked in China) and Douban, and to the Baidu search engine.
Those responsible for these platforms "were summoned to present the existing problems to the cyberspace authorities and to correct them", explained the administration in a statement quoted by EFE.
The institution also informed that, during the first three months of the year, the authorities ordered the closure of 55 applications and the cessation of activity of 4.208 “illegal” 'sites'.
In March, the agency announced that, during 2023, it would launch a series of special campaigns to “clean up” the Internet and “rectify” problems such as the manipulation of information through false accounts and attacks against private companies.
China is the country with the most Internet users in the world (more than a billion) and one of the countries with the greatest control over online content, visible through the blocking of some of the largest online platforms in the world, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
