TWO major Chinese microblogging sites, weibo.com and t.qq.com, have suspended comment functions after they were punished for allowing rumors to spread.
The t.qq.com, run by Tencent, put up an online announcement yesterday morning that it has decided to suspend its comment function from March 31 to April 3 to clean up rumors and other illegal information spread through microbloggings.
The weibo.com operated by Sina also released an announcement yesterday saying it would suspend its comment function during the above-mentioned period.
Chinese authorities have closed 16 websites and detained six people responsible for "fabricating or disseminating online rumors."
The State Internet Information Office (SIIO) and Beijing police said Friday that those websites were closed for spreading groundless rumors of "military vehicles entering Beijing and something wrong going on in Beijing."
Beijing police also detained six people for allegedly fabricating and spreading the above-mentioned rumors, particularly through microblogging posts, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Public Security.
A spokesman with the SIIO also said with regard to a number of rumors having appeared on weibo.com and t.qq.com, the two popular microblogging sites have been "criticized and punished accordingly" by Internet information administration authorities in Beijing and Guangdong respectively.
Beijing police yesterday said they have arrested 1,065 suspects and deleted more than 208,000 "harmful" online messages as part of a crackdown on Internet-related crimes conducted since mid-February.
The operators of more than 3,117 websites have received related warnings, a spokesman from the city police's cybersecurity department said yesterday, adding that 70 Internet companies that defied the warnings have received administrative punishments, including forced closures.
The spokesman said the campaign, dubbed "Spring Breeze," mainly targets the dissemination of information related to smuggling firearms, drugs and toxic chemicals, as well as the sale of human organs, the counterfeiting certificates and invoices and trade in personal information.
The crackdown is meant to address prominent public complaints about Internet-related crimes, the spokesman said, adding that reports about Internet-related crimes have gone down 50 percent since the campaign was launched on February 14.
The spokesman urged Internet users to actively oppose the spread of harmful information.
