Amid the intensive crackdown against irrational idol worship and illegal contents on social media platforms, more netizens are joining the “community committee” of China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo to supervise contents posted by users. Members can report posts that break rules and harm the cyber environment.
Sina Weibo announced on Saturday it has screened all trending topics and lists and closed 2,558 high-rate trending topics amid the country’s fierce campaign to rectify the “fan circle” chaos. Many individual and fan clubs’ official accounts have also been banned during the crackdown actions.
The clean-up of problematic accounts is in accordance with the decision and the vote of members of the Sina Weibo community committee.
Anyone who wants to be a member of the committee has to be above 18 years old, have registered a Sina Weibo account for more than one year and cannot violate any rules within three months. Later, candidates have to pass a test before joining the committee, some netizens interested in the application process mentioned.
Shi Wenxue, cultural critic based in Beijing, told the Global Times that he also applied to be a member of the community committee and recently experienced the work of supervisors in the committee. “I was shocked by some users’ posts,” he said.
Shi said that he has to examine nearly 50 posts that were reported by other netizens and judge if the contents need to be banned.
Many of these posts were extreme remarks about gender discrimination, territory and hot issues that went viral on Sina Weibo. Some also aimed at certain entertainers and there were disputes between fans of different idols.
“We need to determine its nature and write a statement, and after the post gets a certain number of votes, it might be judged as illegal or normal. According to the voting results, the administrators decide whether to block the post or even the account,” Shi noted.
The committee has its own constitution. It is regulated that when the polling number reaches 501, the voting channel will be closed.
Only when more than 50 percent of voters support that the content is out of line, the post could get different degrees of punishment. If more than 80 percent of voters consider the post as inappropriate, the post will be banned.
A group of screenshots of illegal posts on Sina Weibo show that the extreme remarks include gender discrimination such as misandry, misogyny and abuse with insults and threats to entertainers for their poor performance.
“I hoped for a peaceful world before, but now I hope all men die,” read a post that was determined by the committee to allegedly advocate hate.
At the beginning, Shi was shocked by the comments and did not understand why these people used such extreme, irrational and hateful words or why they were full of anger.
“After working for a while, I get used to going through the accounts and reading other posts to find out what they experienced and made them so irrational,” Shi added.
Netizens in the chat group built for members in the community committee share cheering messages almost every day to encourage each other and are proud to be a supervisor of the platform, according to their comments.
Sina Weibo Photo: VCG
