Chinese netizens could soon be punished for liking “negative information”

For the first time, China sees “liking” as a method of online commenting

Internet users in China might soon have to be cautious about what they like on social media and streaming platforms, for they could be held accountable for liking something that the authorities deem unlawful or negative.

The Cyberspace Administration of China released an updated version of its regulations on internet comment services. Taking effect on December 15th, the new regulations have made a few changes compared to the first version, which came out in 2017.

One of the most prominent additions is that “liking” something is now considered a method of commenting. This raises concerns that internet users could soon be punished for liking certain posts, comments, videos and other forms of content.

Here I’m using translations from China Law Translate.

"Post comment services" as referred to in these Provisions, refers to Internet websites, applications, and other website platforms of a public opinion nature or with the capacity to mobilize the public, that provide services for users to express text, code, emojis, pictures, audio, video, or other information through methods such as commenting, responding, leaving messages, realtime streaming comments, "liking", and so forth.

For a story published by Voice of America’s mandarin service, I talked to former Weibo censor, now an editor at China Digital Times, Eric Liu to see how he interprets the new provisions.

He has no doubt that the new rule will be used to punish vocal internet users.

“If liking is now considered commenting, there will be ‘liking crimes’,” he told me.

Other than going after those who liked certain posts, another way to censor liking is prevent it from happening in the first place. Liu said that platforms can require users to log in or have their real identities verified before they are allowed to use the “like” function.

This could help avoid online posts that challenge the government’s preferred narratives from getting a huge number of likes and therefore being displayed in the upper part of the comment sections for everyone to see.

The new regulations also specify that public accounts now bear responsibilities in censoring comments made by other users under their articles and videos. Failing to do so could result in punishments.

and where public account producer-operators' failure to fulfill their management obligations leads to illegal and negative information content appearing in the comment sections, then based on the specific circumstances, measures shall be employed in accordance with laws and agreements to address them, including warnings, deleting of information, temporary suspension -or lifetime closure- of comment area functions, restriction of account functions, suspension of account updates, closing accounts, and prohibiting new registration, and records are to be stored and a report promptly made to the internet information departments.

Public accounts have been censoring received comments for years now. The new regulations might lead to stricter implementations. But how strictly will these rules be carried out, Liu told me that he isn’t sure.

A thorough execution of the new regulations means more resources being put into the censorship sector. And that means, at the very least, hiring a lot more censors than there already are. Liu said that the new regulations will most likely be carried out “at a discount”.

In fact, the final version of the new regulations has already been “discounted”, so to speak.

In June, the Cyberspace Administration released a draft version of the new regulations. What caught a lot of people’s attention at the time was the change made to “censoring before posting” (先审后发). The phrase means that comments should be reviewed by censors before being published.

In the 2017 version, this mechanism only applied to comments responding to news. The June draft expanded it to every type of comments on the internet. And that’s billions, if not more, comments each day.

The Cyberspace Administration may have realized how unpractical it would be to actually censor every single comment online. In the finalized version of the regulations, they dropped the proposed change and stuck with the old one.