In China, a battle has been waged for some time as the government try to clamp down on social networks. A senior official even went to the headquarters of Sina, the biggest social network in the country, to ask them to prevent the spread of “toxic rumours”. There was growing cynicism that the government’s attempts to crack down on ‘rumours’ might be a little bit more than creating a “healthy internet”. According to Reuters, one user said in August:
If this was really about quashing rumours, Internet users would surely welcome that, but I fear that this is not about mere rumours. It’s more about waving this banner as a pretext to cleanse so-called rumours and ban the people from telling the truth.
Despite these fears, Sina have just recently started to put into place some methods to try and cleanse the social network of information that could be a cause for concern. A ‘rumour control’ team has been set up recently and there’s, according to The Next Web, about ten members of that team watching activity on a round-the-clock basis. Their role is to issue warnings to users that they think have crossed the line and they also have the power to suspend and delete accounts. Tan Chao, director of the rumour control team, told China Daily:
The job is vital, as we want to protect the truth and maintain an unpolluted Web. There is a lot of information on Weibo, much of it eye-catching, which means it attracts a lot of people. Yet users are not always good at judging what is true and what is false. They can be easily misled.
Could you imagine Twitter implementing similar measures on their service based on the request of a UK government? Given that one of the ideas mentioned in the wake of the UK was a shutdown of social networks to stop people from communicating at times of social unrest, the answer probably isn’t clear-cut as you might think.
