How the West may turn to China for some unlikely tips on internet regulation
- China’s alternative internet provides its 800 million users with domestic equivalents of most global sites
- In March, a database of about 364 million Chinese social media profiles was leaked online
While the West struggles to get to grips with internet regulation, China already has a sophisticated – some would say repressive – content control system in place.
Governments around the world are scrambling to hold internet companies accountable for what is published on their platforms amid renewed fears about the spread of harmful content on social media.
Last month Facebook enabled an Australian gunman to live stream a mass shooting that left 50 people dead in New Zealand. Though the account was quickly shut down, a video of the massacre circulated online, raising concerns about the consequences of a largely unfettered internet.
In recent weeks, governments in countries including the UK and Singapore have moved to take a more active role in defining the boundaries of acceptable online discourse.
Lawmakers in Australia, for example, passed a sweeping law to punish tech giants like Facebook and Twitter if they fail to remove inappropriate material from their platforms “expeditiously”.
All of this will sound familiar to China. The Chinese government runs the world’s most sophisticated censorship machine, powered by a combination of laws, technology, and human scrutiny.
