Another Brick in the Great Firewall: Sina Weibo's 'Truth' Credits

Censorship in China is nothing new.  Heck, it's practically to be expected these days. Witness last week's censoring of the Shanghai stock exchange's 64.89 point drop on June 4.  See, that number is already on the Great Firewall of China's blacklist because it happens to coincide with the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 6/4/89.  That the drop happened to occur on June 4, the 23rd anniversary of the massacre, well, that's just one of life's rich little ironies.  And it caused havoc, as the censors felt compelled to crack down on any mention of the perfectly legitimate stock market results.  And any mention of the stock market, in fact.  It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.

Now, China's Twitter-like microblog Sina Weibo is threatening to up the censorship ante with a new policy that cracks down on "untrue" content, reports the International Business Times.  This new system comes in the guise of a new point system.  Upon creating a Sina Weibo account, users are given 80 points (or 100 points if they set up their account using their government-assigned ID number).  Subsequently, each "falsehood" that the user communicates to the larger community results in a point loss, with broader communication leading to greater losses.

Spreading falsehoods will lead to deductions in points, among other penalties. Spreading an untruth to 100 other users will result in a deduction of two points. Spreading it to 100-1,000 other users will result in a deduction of five points, as well as a week's suspension of the account. Spreading it to more than 1,000 other users will result in adeduction of 10 points, as well as a 15-day suspension of the account.

Once the point total falls below 60, the user is flagged as "low-credit." A loss of all points will result in an account's closure.

Voice of America adds that users can also gain points by staying in compliance with government censorship policies.

The timing of the new Sina Weibo policy is not particularly surprising, as China has been rocked by several scandals recently, details of which have spread so quickly online as to remain outside the government's ability to control.  Specifically, the fall from grace of high-ranking politician Bo Xilai has spurred much online gossiping, complete with sordid details of sex, murder, and corruption. And that's to say nothing of the rather sensational escape of lawyer Chen Guangcheng from house arrest to the US embassy – made no less dramatic and embarrassing for the Chinese government by the fact that Mr. Chen is blind.  Sina Weibo's new "truth credit" policy is meant to staunch the flow of such scandalmongering, writes IBT. (Nevermind that much of what makes these particular scandals so scandalous is their truth.)

Let us put aside rumormongering about "scandals" that also happen to have happened (which US law would constitutionally protect, since the travails of Mr. Bo and Mr. Chen are clearly of public interest), though. Obviously, that's of concern, but the real danger of this new policy comes from the effect it will have on the reporting of more mundane, though no less important news that the government would just assume not be examined. 

Consider last summer's bullet train accident in Wenzhou, in which dozens were killed and hundreds injured.  When the accident occurred, officials tried to bury the story – at one point quite literally, when they attempted to bury part of the train wreckage.  But Sina Weibo served as a means to spread both information in the accident's aftermath and criticism of the government's failure to prevent the accident and its subsequent coverup attempts.  Because of the online chatter about the accident, the government was forced to respond to the problems that the accident highlighted, rather than brush them under the rug.

But what if the bullet-train accident or a similar sort of event happened under this new Sina Weibo policy? The problem appears twofold.

First, there's the obvious disincentive to Sina Weibo users to comment on a crisis for fear of such comments being declared "untrue." Certainly, this will cut down on the amount of false