By MICHAEL WINES and SHARON LaFRANIERE
BEIJING — The operators of China’s most vibrant equivalent of Twitter notified each of its 200 million users Friday that several bloggers deemed to have spread unfounded rumors would have their accounts suspended for one month.
In messages, the operators of Sina.com’s Weibo microblog detailed the suspensions of the bloggers. The announcements provoked a torrent of online protest, some of which was directed at the government on the assumption that it was behind the punishments.
If so, it was the clearest expression yet of the government’s growing concern about its inability to curb free expression on the Internet — particularly searing criticism of official acts — despite a sweeping and extremely sophisticated censorship regime.
On Monday, a member of the Politburo, the Communist Party committee that acts as China’s collective leadership, visited Sina.com officials and said that they should “resolutely put an end to fake and misleading information.” The official, Beijing’s party secretary, Liu Qi, said they should use new technology to better manage the microbloggers, whose numbers have grown explosively in the last year.
The company’s notices stated that two bloggers who had spread false rumors on Weibo would lose their right to post messages or to add followers for a month. One stated that a blogger had been suspended after posting a false report that the accused killer of a 19-year-old woman had been set free after his politically powerful father intervened.
Another disclosed the suspension of a blogger who accused the Red Cross Society of China, which is mired in a financial scandal, of selling blood at a profit.
Some Weibo users sardonically applauded the suspensions, writing that the notices of them spread the rumors more effectively than the original bloggers.
“I didn’t know about the story till now. How tragic!” one blogger wrote. Others expressed outrage. “How does Weibo know what’s true or not?” one user wrote. “Who gives Weibo the right to silence its users?”
Still, one official of a Chinese Internet-related service, speaking on the condition of anonymity about a matter of deep concern to the authorities, predicted that the notices would have a chilling effect.
Read more at The New York Times
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