The Chinese government has removed 105 apps from Chinese app stores, including US travel information app TripAdvisor, as part of a new campaign to clean up its network.
In a notice issued Tuesday (Dec. 8), China’s Internet Information Technology Office said the first batch of 105 illegal mobile apps, including Owl, Suge, Masked Park, Dramatic Play, and Vision, were removed from its shelves as part of an ongoing “special rectification of information content mess in mobile apps.
China’s network rectification campaign began on November 5, and the target of the rectification, according to China’s Net Information Office, is “mobile applications that spread obscene, violent and bloody illegal information, and provide fraudulent gambling, prostitution and other illegal services.
It is not yet known why the Chinese authorities took down the U.S. travel app. Owl’s main services were to introduce tourist attractions, provide travel advice, and provide an opinion platform for people to post reviews of tourist attractions and related services. That doesn’t seem to be included in the scope of China’s move to rectify the situation.
As of Tuesday, the US company’s website was still open in China. China’s Internet regulator said that the apps that have been taken down so far are just the beginning of a round of clean-ups, with many more to come.
Internet control is an important part of the Chinese government’s policy to maintain stability. Since 2014, the Communist Party has been conducting what it calls a “net-cleaning campaign” against the Internet. China’s four Internet regulatory giants, the National Working Group Office for Combating Pornography and Illegality, the State Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Public Security, joined forces to conduct a comprehensive crackdown on China’s Internet.
During that campaign, the Communist Party shut down a large number of individual and public accounts expressing dissenting views in the name of combating pornography. The Xinhua News Agency, the official Chinese Communist Party media outlet, reported that authorities shut down “133 WeChat public accounts that spread distorted information about the Party’s history and the country’s history” during the operation.
Observers have pointed out that the Communist Party cleaned up its network and built a firewall in order to filter out all information that the Communist Party did not want the Chinese public to know. The most popular U.S. social media in the world, such as Facebook and Twitter, have been blocked in China, but for years the U.S. has been open to all kinds of social media in China.
It is only in the last two years that the Trump administration has begun to fight back, taking restrictive measures against popular social media such as TikTok (international version of Shakespeare) and WeChat in China. In September, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a blocking order against the TikTok and WeChat apps.
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