The Chinese Communist Party has cracked down on and imprisoned Chinese netizens who use foreign social media to criticize Xi Jinping and his government in an effort to preserve the image of the Communist Party leader.
According to an analysis of court records and a database maintained by a free speech activist, more than 50 people have been sentenced in China in the past three years for using Twitter and other foreign platforms blocked in China for disrupting public order and bashing the Communist Party’s leadership, the Wall Street Journal website reported Monday.
The increasing use of sentencing as a tactic by the Chinese Communist Party marks an escalation in government actions to control online speech and stifle critical voices outside the relatively closed world of the Internet at Home, the report said. In the past, suppression of views on foreign social media was mainly enforced through arrests and harassment, and few people were sentenced, human rights activists said.
The report cited “offending comments” presented in Chinese court records, including criticism of the country’s leaders and the Communist Party, and discussions of Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan, and the fact that the Twitter accounts involved did not have many followers, usually a few hundred or a few thousand, with one having fewer than 30 followers at the Time of his arrest.
The report also said that Twitter has become a propaganda battleground for China. Beijing promotes its rhetoric on Twitter through an ever-expanding number of diplomatic and official media accounts, as well as through the Fifty Cents Party. These 50 Maoist parties advocate the views of the Chinese government online and attack the CCP’s critics.
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