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China’s Communist Party
ChinaPolitics

Chinese police arrest over 1,500 for online rumours in campaign targeting influencers, bloggers and live-streamers

  • China shuts down 63,000 illegal accounts in crackdown on social media posts with false information about hot issues such as pandemic and disasters
  • Top influencer Thurman Maoyibei, whose accounts were shut down over the weekend, is among those caught up in campaign launched late last year

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Chinese police have punished social media users who have used AI to make up fake stories and rumours as part of a campaign launched in December. Photo: Shutterstock
Xinlu Liangin Beijing
China’s Ministry of Public Security said police around the country have made over 1,500 arrests and solved 10,000 cases since the launch of a campaign targeting online rumours in December.
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The ministry has imposed administrative penalties on about 10,700 people and debunked more than 4,200 rumours since it launched the campaign last December, according to a Tuesday report by People’s Daily. The numbers were first released on Saturday on the official WeChat account of the ministry’s cybersecurity office.

The campaign has identified and investigated illegal activities that make money from spreading rumours about hot-button issues. Specifically, the ministry has clamped down on influencers, bloggers and video producers who “stage photos maliciously or fabricate rumours” regarding the pandemic, dangers or disasters.

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The latest round focused on social media, live-streaming and short-video platforms, where the ministry shut down 63,000 illegal accounts and cleaned up more than 735,000 posts that contained rumours, according to the WeChat post.

The ministry shared 10 examples of rumour-related cases targeted in the campaign, including the case of top influencer “Thurman Maoyibei”, whose accounts were shut down over the weekend after she fabricated a viral story about a young boy and his schoolbooks.

Thurman Maoyibei – whose real surname is Xu, according to police – has more than 30 million followers across different platforms. In February, she posted a video claiming a waiter in Paris had given her some textbooks that had been left behind by a Chinese boy named Qin Lang. Xu said she would embark on a mission to return them to the boy back in China.

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The video went viral and attracted millions of clicks and comments on Weibo and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, prompting online users to search for the boy. A week later, Xu said in another video that she had found the boy’s family and returned the textbooks to him.

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