China Kicks Off New Web Crackdown

It looks like the Chinese web may be in for another round of spring cleaning. On April 2, China’s National Sweep Out Porn, Strike At Rumors Office announced that three major domestic companies had been investigated and fined for pornographic content posted to their online platforms: web search giant Baidu, news site NetEase, and Momo, the Alibaba-backed mobile dating app whose December 2014 IPO in New York raised $216 million. The fines come as the first slate of cases in 2015’s “sweep out porn, strike at rumors” campaign, kicking off the third year of what now seems to have become an increasingly institutionalized push to remove sexually explicit -- and politically objectionable -- material from China’s turbulent Internet. State media have hailed the campaigns as a way to keep children safe from “harmful information” on computers and mobile phones.

In classic form, an April 3 article in state news agency Xinhua featured an interview with a Shanghai mother name Zhao Yan, who told reporters that “when relevant government authorities sweep out porn and strike hard at rumors, it creates a clean and bright Internet environment for children to grow up in.” But detractors have argued that the core of the web cleanup is not removing pornography but rather silencing dissent and preventing the spread of information that authorities consider destabilizing.