Chinese Ban Internet Rumors

dptalia writes "Chongqing province in southwest China has just passed a law fining people who post malicious rumors online. An individual can face fines of 1,000 to 5,000 yuan ($630) and an organization can be fined between 3,000 and 15,000 yuan."

Comments

Chinese internet culture

[DNS-and-BIND]

Chinese people use message boards a *lot* more than Americans. You might browse a few boards, even be a regular, but (some) Chinese people are rabid about it. In a nation with people are used to not getting the whole story from the media, message boards are looked upon as a source of "true" information. Of course, this is taken advantage of and people post fake information in order to hurt people, hurt business, or just cause mischief. Online witch-hunts are fairly common, when someone will post a complaint about you and a mob of posters will go and look up all sorts of information about you, call your boss, harass your company's support line, send you nasty SMS to your phone, etc. Here is a sample of a few of these types of stories.

For China, this is especially worrisome, because not only is the social order hurt, but the government as well. They're mostly worried that a particularly outrageous false rumor might force the government to change in some way. Note that this was done by a single provincial government - the lower ranks of government are particularly threatened. The Chinese government isn't a single monolith - the different ranks of government can be quite independent of each other. This article should have been titled "Chongqingnese ban internet rumors". But, after living in China for a while, I no longer expect the news that I read to be accurate in any way, nor do I expect that people who give me the news to care that they are not accurate.