Tyree Glascoe ‘17
CPN 100.11
Ms. O’Grady-Evens
9/9/13
Social Media Crisis in China Social media websites have been the craze among citizens of all ages throughout the world for the past couple of years. These networks allowed individuals from one side of the world to be able to contact with individuals from the complete other side. A few examples of these networks are Facebook, My Space, and the new fad Twitter. Twitter has been recently on the news has been focused on China’s new social media crisis. This crisis came around once China’s strong communist beliefs and government saw that other citizens had been going against the ways they were brought up. Social media influences have been criticized for the spreading of “rumors” throughout the cyber world. Chinese citizens started fabricating lies about the department officials to smear their reputations. (Mercouch 9)
Although many countries apply freedom of speech laws to all citizens, the Chinese government on the other hand doesn’t believe in such a thing. Their governments new decision to start cracking down on these major cyber influences, who abuse their Internet popularity. China has one of the highest rates of Internet users in the world. With over 500 million active members, Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, is used to instantly share news and views. Many don’t realize, but "…In recent years, the internet has been used to maliciously fabricate facts and damage the reputation of others ... and to concoct rumors that mislead the people, causing serious disruptions of social order and even mass incidents…" (Wen 13). China uses this as their backbone to enforce their new law, the Supreme Court is realizing how the newly found rumors can cause an individual personal and emotional harm, and something they don’t want their citizens to face. The government turned to the police force to help take a new stance against all of this cyber madness. The police’s first stance has been to shut down, or block from Chinese users hundred of social media users, claiming that they were stating “false claims” that were mainly towards their political system. Some of the courts now say “… the spread of such rumors could automatically incur a three-year prison term, but if the post is read by 5,000 or more people and/or shared more than 500 times, the penalty could jump to 10 years in jail.” (Nauman 6). China is now showing the drastic measures