BEIJING: China will further tighten its Internet regulations with a pledge on Sunday to strengthen controls over search engines and online news portals, the latest step in President Xi Jinping’s push to maintain strict Communist Party control over content.
Xi has made China’s “cyber sovereignty” a top priority in his sweeping campaign to bolster security. He has also reasserted the ruling Communist Party’s role in limiting and guiding online discussion.
The five-year cultural development and reform plan released by the party and State Council, or Cabinet, calls for a “perfecting” of laws and rules related to the Internet.
That includes a qualification system for people working in online news, according to the plan, carried by the official Xinhua news agency.
“Strike hard against online rumors, harmful information, fake news, news extortion, fake media and fake reporters,” it said, without giving details.
Xi has been explicit that media must follow the party line, uphold the correct guidance on public opinion and promote “positive propaganda.”
The plan comes on top of existing tight Internet controls, which includes the blocking of popular foreign websites such as Google and Facebook.
The government last week issued tighter rules for online news portals and network providers.
Regulators say such controls are necessary in the face of growing security threats, and are done in accordance with the law.
Speaking more broadly about the country’s cultural sector, the plan calls for efforts to reinforce and improve “positive propaganda.”
“Strengthen and improve supervision over public opinion,” it added.
The plan also calls for more effort to be put into promoting China’s point of view and cultural soft power globally, though without giving details.
China to further tighten its Internet controls
China to further tighten its Internet controls
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
