The Latest Fad of the CCP in China? Validating Each Comment Before Publishing It on the Internet.
Public criticism of Xi Jinping's Zero-Covid policy has probably prompted the authorities to act in this direction.
A fervent defender of a society of mass surveillance of which the party wants to be the showcase at the global level, the CCP wants to go even further. Xi Jinping and his comrades want to strengthen their control over what happens and is said on the Internet.
China's Internet watchdog recently unveiled several new draft rules aimed at controlling even more strongly what happens on the web. In addition to requiring influencers to have the necessary qualifications to discuss highly professional topics such as law and medicine, there is also talk of reviewing all comments before they are published and reporting any “illegal and bad information” found in the information service on the Internet.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls it a law for the common good
It is difficult not to see in this project a new way for the Chinese authorities to control the voice of its population on the Internet, even if they assure that the goal is to “safeguard national security and public interests, and protect the rights and legitimate interests of citizens”.
Moreover, if they wish, Chinese Internet users can give their opinion on this new measure until July 1st, 2022. After that, it should come into force.
Some were quick to express their concern about the further erosion of their online freedom of expression. “I can't imagine what it will be like to have only one particular voice of opinion. Will people think that in real life there is only one voice?” worried one user on Weibo, China's version of Twitter where censorship is already rife.
The topic is particularly popular on Weibo, with a dedicated hashtag getting more than 35.2 million views. Unfortunately for them, draft regulations in China “are usually passed without major revisions,” according to the South China Morning Post.
The comments represent the last annoying point for the Chinese authorities
It's no secret that the Middle Kingdom exercises particularly strong censorship over its population, whether in the media or on the Internet, but until now comments have traditionally been less monitored than publications, according to the MIT Technology Review:
“The provisions cover many types of comments, including anything from forum posts, replies, messages left on public message boards, and “bullet chats” (an innovative way that video platforms in China use to display real-time comments on top of a video). All formats, including texts, symbols, GIFs, pictures, audio, and videos, fall under this regulation.”
This new regulation, which should logically come into force at a still unknown date, comes to correct the last annoying point for the Chinese authorities. It risks hindering, even more, the already very weak freedom of expression that the Chinese enjoy.
The fact that platforms are also required to report illegal comments to the government will allow them to be taken into account in the Chinese social credit system in the form of negative points. This will dissuade those who would have had the audacity to express an opinion different from that of the CCP.
The appearance of several negative comments under the publications of the government accounts, as well as the complaints following the food shortages in a context of strict confinement, are certainly what pushed the authorities to elaborate this new rule.
Instead of trying to understand the growing unhappiness of the Chinese population due to the increasingly strict application of Xi Jinping's Zero-Covid policy, the Chinese authorities are once again choosing the same path: more and more constraints and surveillance of the Chinese society.
The problem here is that this could end up inspiring Western governments who love to criticize China's model of a mass surveillance society, but who don't seem to be against the implementation of some of the rules enforced in China by Xi Jinping and the CCP.