China is cracking down on news that appears on social media, banning news outlets from creating stories out of information they find on websites like Facebook.
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The country’s official Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, made the announcement Sunday evening, saying that traditional news outlets were no longer allowed to use what it called “hearsay” online.
“It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts,” the agency said in a statement. “All levels of the cyberspace administration must earnestly fulfill their management responsibility for internet content, strengthen supervision and investigation, severely probe and handle fake and unfactual news.”
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The country formed the “Beijing Regional Platform for Jointly Refuting Rumors” in 2013, which was similarly aimed at monitoring speech online, though Sunday’s step seemed to increase the level of enforcement. In its announcement, the agency cited offending incidents from the past, including one false story about a bus fire.
China’s censorship regime is one of the world’s most ubiquitous, blocking users from accessing pages like Google or Facebook. The country also leads the world in requests for content removal, asking companies like Microsoft to remove pages from search engines like Bing.
