Under the new regulations, bulletin board systems (BBS), services that send news messages to individual cell phones and other online services, must register with the government, a condition that was already in place for more established foreignjournalism outfits. A move earlier this year targeted bloggersand other non-business sites not run by news organizations.
“We need to better regulate the online news services with the emergence of so many unhealthy news stories that will easily mislead the public,” an unnamed spokesman told the government-owned newspaper China Daily.
All news organizations will need permission from the State Council Information Office, according to China Daily.
The move is the latest in a government effort to tighten its grip on the Internet in China. In June, blogs and all other all Internet sites operating in the country that weren’t properly registered were to be shut down (see China Shuts Web Sites).
(see China Shuts Web Sites).The new regulations, introduced by both the State Council Information and Ministry of Information offices, seem to show the government’s determination to keep up with the use of information technology. “[Prior regulations] lagged far behind the development of online news services in technology, content, and form,” said the government spokesman.
Spreading the News
“This is about the spreading of news, not the publishing of news,” said Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization that promotes free-speech rights on the Internet.
“What they’re trying to cover here is the grey area between private and public communication,” he added, noting the rules on personal comments on bulletin boards and news disseminated by mobile phone.
Mr. O’Brien said the move was typical of how the Chinese regulate online content.
“The biggest issue in China is the arbitrariness and the sudden changes,” said Mr. O’Brien, the EFF’s activism coordinator. “Services like Yahoo say they have to follow the rules in China, but the rules are always changing… It’s like an intimidation tactic.”
YahooA news site that publishes stories prepared by other sources and non-news sites that publish news stories from other sources must both get approval from the State Council Information Office. Sites by organizations that only run their own stories must register at the main or provincial offices.
“The state bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest,” reported the Xinhua news agency.
Details of the rules were not given, though Xinhua said that sites must be “directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion.”
Mr. O’Brien said the new rules could also be in response to the latest bout of critical news stories about China’s free speech restrictions in the Western media, both online and in print. Critics say that Chinese journalist Shi Tao was jailed earlier this month thanks in part to information provided by Yahoo.
“Right now China has been having a lot of bad press,” Mr. O’Brien said.
Minimal Email Filtering
To be sure, China experts have said they don’t expect the government to be able to maintain control over all online media content. For example, email filtering is minimal, according to the Open Net Initiative (see Net Censors Active In China). Typically, censors look for unacceptable words or phrases in search lines and URLs rather than in the content of a site.
ChinaChina is encouraging citizen participation on the Internet by asking citizens who find “unhealthy online stories” report them to a government site.