The country’s top censorship body has been running an annual online crackdown known as “Qing Lang”, which means clear and bright, since 2020.
It said this year’s crackdown would benefit people’s mental health and create a healthy space for competition that would help the short video industry develop.
The watchdog said one of the targets of the latest campaign would be content producers who make up stories about social minorities to win public sympathy. It would also crack down on people staging incidents, “making up fake plots and spreading panic”.
It also mentioned several incorrect values that it wanted to remove from the internet including “the wrong career values”, “promoting pessimism and extremism” and “extravagance and money worship”.
In March the head of the watchdog said the crackdown this year would target other incorrect values in areas such as marriage, money, history and relations between ethnic groups.
But this week marks the first time that pessimism has been listed as one of the incorrect values and comes as the country’s economy continues to struggle to get back on track after the Covid-19 pandemic.
In recent months, many posts by people who have invested in unfinished properties and risk losing their money have been deleted, especially on Douyin.
This includes some of the most widely shared footage involving a couple in the central province of Henan, who won widespread sympathy after documenting how a struggling property developer had stopped work on an unfinished flat for which they had already made a down payment.
China’s internet watchdog to boost tip-offs to stamp out ‘illegal’ content
China’s internet watchdog to boost tip-offs to stamp out ‘illegal’ content
Later updates highlighted their increasing desperation and said they had been assaulted by the developer when asking for a refund. Late last month most of their social media accounts were suspended.
The crackdown will also prohibit AI-generated fake short videos that manipulate or make up content, or illegally use other people’s voices or faces.
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Why China is tightening control over cybersecurity
Why China is tightening control over cybersecurity
According to the cyberspace administration, between 2021 and 2022, the Qing Lang crackdown led to the suspension of 1.35 billion accounts, the deletion of 76 million illegal or improper messages and the shutting down of 10,500 websites.