BEIJING—China announced sweeping new regulations requiring users of an array of Internet services to register with their real names and avoid spreading content that challenges national interests.
Internet users will also be punished for adopting misleading handles such as “Putin,” “Obama” or “People’s Daily,” state media said Wednesday of the new rules, which could hurt some of the country’s biggest Internet companies.
The requirements apply to users of blogs, microblogs, instant-messaging services, online discussion forums, news comment sections and related services, said the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s Internet regulator, in a statement posted on its website.
Internet users will still be allowed to select their own usernames and avatars as long as they don’t involve “illegal or unhealthy” content.
“Username chaos” had become a serious problem on the Chinese Internet, the state-run China News Service said in a report on the new regulations, citing an unidentified representative of the regulator. Fake accounts, it said, had “polluted the Internet ecology, harmed the interests of the masses, and seriously violated core socialist values.”
The Internet regulator didn’t immediately respond to requests to comment. According to the China News Service, Internet companies will be required to devote staff to implement the requirements.
The new regulations, to be enforced starting March 1, ban nine categories of usernames, including anything that harms national security, involves national secrets, incites ethnic discrimination or hatred, or harms national unity. Names that promote pornography, gambling, violence, terror, superstition and rumors are also banned, according to the statement.
Users will also be required to agree to respect the law, the socialist political system, social morality and truth before being allowed to use a given service.
Chinese Internet companies and users have pushed back against efforts to implement real-name registration in the past. The current drive, however, comes amid an unusually intense period of ideological and political tightening that has included
warnings about the infiltration of “Western ideas” in higher education and demands that artists produce
work that is more patriotic.
Chinese President
Xi Jinping has been determined to quash dissent and frank in portraying the Internet as an ideological battleground the Communist Party must dominate. He has created a new high-level committee on Internet security and put himself at its helm. He has also presided over efforts to
replace Western-made computer chips with local alternatives and force foreign tech companies to submit their
products to security reviews
In January, regulators shut down dozens of social-media accounts for offenses ranging from spreading pornography to distorting history. Earlier this week,
authorities accused Netease, a U.S.-listed Internet portal known for its relatively light censorship, of having “serious orientation problems,” saying it was helping spread rumors and smut. Netease didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The new rules, if strictly implemented, could have ripple effects throughout the Chinese Internet, analysts said.
Besides limiting speech, the real-name requirement could hurt popular products like
Tencent Holdings Ltd. ’s QQ instant messaging service,
Baidu Inc. ’s Tieba discussion forums and the Weibo microblogging platform, all of which are crawling with duplicate or “zombie” accounts.
“In a one-person, one-account situation, you’re going to see a lot of water flow out of the system,” said Zhu Wei, an expert in media law at the Chinese University of Political Science and Law, referring to artificially inflated user counts.
Baidu declined to comment. Tencent didn’t respond to a request to comment. In a statement posted online, Weibo vowed to abide by the new regulations and to “improve its management of information related to nicknames, avatars and personal descriptions.”
In addition to decreased user numbers, Chinese Internet companies face significant added operational costs associated with identifying users, verifying their information and tracking their activities, analysts said. With regulators offering few details about implementation, it is possible companies will again try to resist, though analysts said the government was not likely to give up on real-name registration.
“To maintain the stability of society and national security has always been at the top of the list for the Chinese government, and it is continuously revising the regulations to make sure it has the necessary coverage,” said Charlie Dai, an Internet analyst with Forrester Research.
There are multiple levels of identity validation and the government is likely to negotiate with individual Internet companies over which level they needed to implement, Mr. Dai said. Users might be unhappy, but they have few other choices, he added. “Some will leave, but finally most of them will accept it,” he said.
Chinese Internet companies would probably benefit from the added requirements in the long run because of the increased credibility they would bring, according to Mr. Zhu. In any case, he said, the companies didn’t have much choice.
“These rules aren’t the end. They’re not even the beginning of the end,” he said, pointing to a proposal for a unified tracking system—managed by the Public Security Bureau—that would allow users to register for any Internet service using a digital ID based on their government-issued ID card. “This isn’t far in the future,” he said. “It’s going to be in the near future.”
China to Enforce Real-Name Registration for Internet Users - WSJ
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