China to prosecute users who ‘like’ content they consider ‘negative’

A new regulation by the Chinese Cyberspace Administration, according to which network users they will be liable if they click “like” on information deemed “negative”, it is effective today.

body regulation published a new version of its regulation at the end of November, which establishes that “likes” are equal to a comment, and therefore the authors are equally liable to platforms and authorities.

The rules stipulate that commentators must abide by “laws”, uphold “public order and decency”, promote “core socialist values”, and refrain from publishing “information prohibited by relevant government regulations”.

Neither platforms nor users will be able to “deceive public opinion,” the institution said in a statement.

Among some of the materials that the body considers “negative” or “harmful” are those that “attack national honor and interests”, “defame or deny the deeds and spirit of heroes and martyrs”, “promote terrorism”, “incite ethnic hatred” . ‘, ‘spread rumours’ or ‘disrupt the economic and social order’.

Administration Cyberspace calls on the platforms to “improve comment viewing” and “real-time checking”.

In recent weeks, as both virtual and face-to-face protests against the policy have taken place in major Chinese cities, “zero covid, Numerous netizens reminded the inevitability of the new rules in their posts criticizing the government’s policies: “Quick, click likes while we still can” and similar formulas were a regular message.

“This is a regression of ten thousand steps. Who determines what is negative information?” lamented a user of Weibo, a Twitter-like platform blocked in the country.

In July, Chinese social networks such as Weibo announced a campaign against homophonic messages, or misspelled Chinese characters, used by the country’s internet users to bypass censorship.

A few months earlier, Chinese authorities issued a code of conduct with 31 “bad habits” for influential people, forbidding them from slandering the country’s culture, historical figures or national heroes, and urging them to avoid promoting topics considered sensitive.

China is the country with the largest number of Internet users in the world (over 1000 million), but at the same time one of the countries with the most control over web content, as evidenced by the fact that popular sites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is blocked in the country for years.

EFE