The Pros And Cons Of Social Media In China

1725 Words7 Pages

Several years ago, there was a very interesting and hot argument in Chinese internet forum: What difference do you think is between northern part and southern part of China? This topic may sound funny today because we are living in the information era, which means our environment consists of abundant information. Everybody can receive different the newest information immediately, even the news is from another side of the earth, and we really believe that the internet can help us connect the whole world. But, to everybody’s surprise, this hot topic revealed that most of the people who even live in the same country, also have a huge misunderstanding for other provinces of the country, such as the winter lifestyle. For southern people, they thought …show more content…

In China, there is a social media called Weibo. It is the most popular social media for Chinese people to share their daily life, there are many news media use Weibo as the online news publication platform for them. However, with Weibo’s users becomes increasing, there are some organizations or news media would like to distort the headline and make up some fake news to attract attention from users so that they can get benefits. Most of them would like to use some news which are very close to daily life to make people pay attention to them, such as spreading some fake news like what kind of food has been added up some chemical additives by profiteers to make people be scared. Because the food issue in China has been a big problem since many news about how merchants added chemical additives to food to make profits were exposure, the news about food is very easy to attract peoples’ attention and make them worried. And also, because it is very easy to write short news on Weibo, sometimes some news media will employ some editors or journalists, who have no too much experience, to manage their accounts and post news for them. In order to be the first one to post the news online to grab peoples’ attention, those editors or journalist won’t check the news strictly but just post online directly, which is very easy to create fake news and cause social panic. In order to crack down on fake news, Chinese government enacted lots of laws, such as spreading fake news may face up to 7 years in prison, and except that, the Chinese government set up Net alarms, or watchdogs to scour the Internet for calls to violence, fake news and pornography (AFP). For some people, the censorship for social media in China is pretty strict, but from the other hand, it is the most helpful way to prevent fake news. In 2015, the Middle respiratory syndrome