The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), chief online regulatory agency for the Communist regime, on Tuesday imposed a half-million-dollar fine on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site that stands in for Twitter.
Weibo was vaguely accused of posting “information forbidden by law and regulations,” which means it did not censor its users aggressively enough to please the authoritarian government.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) speculated the “forbidden” information might have pertained to tennis star Peng Shuai, who was made to disappear after accusing a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official of sexually assaulting her a decade ago.
Peng leveled her accusation in an emotional Weibo post, which Communist Party censors erased within minutes of her posting it.
Many Weibo users acted quickly enough to screen-shot the post before it was obliterated, so the censors shifted into higher gear, blocking searches for information about her and deleting her name from Chinese websites. The Party even censored Western media broadcasts that mentioned her.
The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) suspended all tournaments in China at the beginning of September due to the abuse of Peng Shuai, and there is heavy pressure on other tennis organizations and the Olympic committee to follow suit.
This combination of file photos shows tennis player Peng Shuai of China (L) during her women’s singles first round match at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne on January 16, 2017; and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli (R) during a visit to Russia at the Saint Petersburg International Investment Forum in Saint Petersburg on June 18, 2015. (Photo by PAUL CROCK,ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP via Getty Images)
CAC did not specify exactly what offenses merited Weibo’s $471,165 fine, but the Communist agency said it has punished Weibo 44 times this year, with fines totaling about $2.25 million in U.S. dollars.
Weibo “sincerely accepted” CAC’s judgment and promised to “earnestly fulfill” its directives, in particular pledging to crack down on “soft pornography” and “malicious marketing.”
The Chinese government has been cracking down on Chinese tech companies throughout 2021, a regulatory jihad that arguably began when flamboyant mogul Jack Ma dared to criticize Communist Party policies in October 2020 and vanished from public view soon thereafter.
Chinese tech companies have been fined and publicly chastised for anti-competitive business practices, allowing “fan culture” to spiral out of control, encouraging excessive consumerism, getting young people hooked on addictive videogames, and allowing too much “vulgar” material to be shared online.
At the beginning of December, CAC fined another Chinese social media company called Douban the equivalent of $235,000 U.S. for “unlawful release of information.” As with Tuesday’s action against Weibo, no details were given.
Douban is a social media site devoted to discussing movies and popular culture. CAC hit Douban with another, much smaller fine on Monday, once again for distributing unspecified “prohibited content.”
Internet analysts puzzling over the Weibo and Douban fines suggest that in addition to silencing discussion of Peng Shuai’s allegations, the Communist Party wants to tighten speech controls ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and before next year’s “re-nomination” of Xi Jinping as China’s senior leader, a position he can hold for life under rules his rubber-stamp parliament rewrote in 2018.