As livestreaming has become more popular, the emergence of livestreaming news websites became a new front for testing the limits of the reporting ban, as many accounts livestreamed public events.
Just days after the new regulation was announced, Beijing cyberspace affairs officials gave verbal warnings to several websites including sina.com, 163.com, ifeng.com and Tencent for hosting livestreaming programs that they decided were violating the reporting ban.
This isn't the first time that the capital's cyberspace affairs authorities have cracked down on news information websites and their products. Last July, for example, it asked sina.com, sohu.com, 163.com and ifeng.com to close or rectify eight internet news columns including Signpost and hudunews. This March, it again gave warnings to five Internet portals, asking them to close or rectify nine of their news columns that violated news publishing rules.
Apart from these news websites, the authorities have also been tightening their supervision over online forums such as Baidu Tieba, the largest Chinese communication platform provided by the search engine company. This March, the cyberspace authorities criticized Baidu Tieba for hosting illegal and "unhealthy" information, and demanded it make rectifications.
Self-monitoring
"The new regulation will push the platforms to further tighten up their screening of information that's published and filter illegal content," Wang said.
The authorities' growing concern over these online platforms in the past year has already lead the platforms to invest more time and effort into monitoring content generated by their users and deleting posts that violate the rules or might cause trouble.
One of the best examples is probably WeChat, Tencent's massively popular instant messaging app. As of 2016, there were over 12 million registered WeChat public accounts, a 46.2 percent rise over 2015. That number is expected to grow to 14 million by the end of this year, says a report by iiMedia Research, a mobile Internet sector consulting firm.
In the past two years, WeChat has been tightening its terms of services. For example, accounts that try to entice or coerce readers to follow their accounts or share their articles are prohibited. Accounts spotted violating this rule twice are shut down indefinitely.
The website xiguaji.com, which monitors WeChat public accounts, has been tracking deleted accounts and posts on WeChat for over a year. Its statistics show that among the 1 million accounts that it monitors, around 20,000 to 40,000 posts are deleted each month for violating platform rules.
"We saw a rise in the number of posts being deleted in the second half of last year, peaking at 48,448 posts in November alone. This January and February, over Spring Festival, the number of posts being deleted dropped. After that it started to grow again to 31,739 in April," Qian Xi, business director of xiguaji.com, told the Global Times.
Accounts that publish illegal content face suspension, but the process is far from consistent.
In a recent report, Newrank, a big data company tracking new media and user-generated media, analyzed WeChat's suspensions. It followed the activities of a public account called "Chinese economist," which was suspended the morning after it published a commentary entitled "Huang Yiping: The Chinese economy won't survive this time" at around 8 pm on February 18. By 9 am the next morning, the account had been suspended.
Newrank then searched for the keywords in the commentary's headline and found 12 articles with the same content, but not all the accounts had been suspended. It concluded that whether an account will be suspended has no clear link to an account's number of followers or views, or whether it's the source of an article deemed unacceptable.
"So far, we're not clear exactly what factors trigger WeChat's punishments. But whether users make complaints might be a major reason," Li Lan, a technical product researcher at Newrank, told the Global Times.
Wang Gong (pseudonym), an editor of public WeChat account Yugong Tianxia, said many we-media providers have a feeling that WeChat's supervision has been getting harsher in the past year. The account, which has been running since last September, has been publishing light news analysis and news stories on a daily basis.
Despite the growing monitoring, he says the account will not change their current course, even though they hope to make money in the long term and the changing policies might affect their profitability. "On one hand, we want to see how strictly the regulations are implemented, and on the other hand, we started out wanting to be an account on hot news topics and we don't want to change that," he told the Global Times.
