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."

Only malicious rumours?

[Channard]

Damn. I was hoping this could herald an end to bogus virus alerts and urban legends.

This is China

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the country that calls anything that it doesn't like a state secret. You can get the death penalty for leaking a state secret. For example: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?Acti onID=157 [amnesty.org.uk] They really don't like it if you complain about things like police brutality. That makes you a terrorist. Police brutality is a state secret after all.

So this new law will get you fined if you point out that a corrupt official who is supposed to only earn the equivalent of $10,000 is driving a new Mercedes.

I titled my post "This is China". I am by no means implying that they are the only bad guys on the block. At least one other country has recently passed a law that removes people's right to due process and virtually legalizes torture.

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 [zonaeuropa.com].

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.

There may be a good reason for this

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I'm too lazy to look it up, but some months ago Slashdot had a story about how an internet rumor in China just about destroyed the lives of 2 people. An angry husband posted that his wife was having an affair with another man he had a grudge against. None of it was true, but the good Chinese netizens who read it didn't bother to question it. After all, if someone said it on the internet, it must be true! They found out where the man and woman worked who were accused of having an affair and people showed up to harass them for an affair that they weren't even having. The husband eventually admitted it was all a lie, but only after a lot of harassment was done towards his wife and the other guy. Similar stories have been reported in other Asian countries where angry netizens decided to start harassing people over articles they read about online that they had no way of knowing whether or not they were even true.

I don't know why so many people believe everything they read online. It's not just in Asia. Some years ago I worked as a civilian computer programmer for the US Air Force. Roughly around 1995 or so, at my former base basically everyone got an internet connection on their PC and they believed every rumor that came out. If someone said it in email, it must be true because nobody would ever lie in email, right? One of my former co-workers used to send me copies of emails he got where I would see over 100 people on the CC: line about some wild rumor or another that they were aboslutely convinced was true. My favorite was the story about some guy waking up in a bathtub full of ice minus his kidneys. All of these emails would say to send the message to everyone you knew to warn them about whatever the rumor was. After a year or so, it got so out of hand that senior management basically had to pass an edict forbidding people from sending this stuff out to massive distribution lists on the base and they finally got it under control. Even today, my retired uncle believes every single negative rumor he reads. I used to reply to his emails and send him links to snopes.com refuting his emails, but I just gave up when he told me that it wasn't his job to verify the truth of what he passed on. He was just passing on potentially "helpful" information and it was up to recipient to determine if there was anything to it or not.

Re:This is China

[maxpublic]

Ah, I see. If a country in Europe does it it's protecting people from "hate speech" or "slander", but if China does it it's "censorship". Funny, as an American I'm having a hard time seeing that well-nigh invisible dividing line between the two. Do I need my EU-approved secret decoder ring for this?

Max

Moo

[Chacham]

In one sense this is good. Rumors can be a very bad thing in how they can destroy a person's life. However, what if the person is mentioning the rumor for discussion? The article mentions the language say "defamatory comments or remarks, launch personal attacks or seek to damage reputations online". It seems to be keeping it to personal levels. I hope that is the way it works out legally.