Chinese Government Bans Viral Internet Posts, Teenager Arrested For Viral Tweet

Chinese law criminalizes online posts that are read by more than 5,000 people or reblogged more than 500 times

Chinese internet café in Lijiang, Yunnan, PR China from the inside. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

By JG Vibes
Intellihub.com
September 23, 2013

Since a new censorship law went into effect earlier this month in China, 5 people have been fined, and one arrested after making viral posts on the internet that the government disapproved of.  The measure went into effect on September 9th, and the Chinese government is calling it an “anti gossip” law to stop the spread of “online rumors”.  The law extends to viral posts that are read by more than 5,000 people or reblogged more than 500 times.
After making a post to raise awareness about police brutality, a 16 year old was taken into custody indefinitely, and the government is refusing to release his full name to the media.  According to the boys post the local police murdered an innocent man and then staged a suicide to cover their tracks.
The Beijing Times reported that the boy, surnamed Yang, had falsely accused police officers of assaulting the dead man’s relatives in multiple postings on his blog. It was also reported that the dead man’s relatives tried to stop police from carrying out an autopsy. Police later said the man had died after falling from a building.[1]
“Where is justice?” Yang wrote over the weekend in a message posted on his QQ account, a messaging service popular among young Chinese, and on a microblog on Tencent. “Three days and two nights have passed since the death, and the major media are not reporting the case.… People still don’t know the truth.”[2]
The Zhangjiachuan County Public Security Bureau said in a posting on its own Internet account that Yang’s message “seriously disrupted social order.”

“After reading Yang’s posts, a few dozen unemployed people gathered at the scene of the death and started to chant slogans. Hundreds gathered and caused serious traffic congestion at the scene. The situation was out of control, disrupted social order and the police investigation into the case,” the security department complained.
“I am really scared now that any whistleblowing might lead to an arrest,” said Zhou Ze, a rights lawyer with more than 165,000 followers on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. “We all have to talk less, and more carefully,” he added, to Reuters.[3]
“It’s far too easy for something to be reposted 500 times or get 5,000 views,” Reuters quoted one Sina Weibo user as saying. “Who is going to dare say anything now?”[4]

Sources:
[1] Police arrest 16-year-old boy in Gansu for spreading internet ‘rumours’ – South China Morning Post
[2] China teen arrested for controversial crime of spreading rumors online – LA Times
[3] Teenager becomes first person arrested under China’s new anti-gossip law -Telegraph
[4] Chinese teen arrested for getting more than 500 retweets – The Daily Dot