Chinese police arrest two men for spreading 'false information' online

[News_Editor]

Chinese police arrest two men for spreading 'false information' online

2011-12-12 17:48:45 GMT+7 (ICT)

CHANGSHA, CHINA (BNO NEWS) -- Chinese police arrested two men on Sunday after they allegedly spread false information online about a large number of police officers guarding a wedding in south-central China, state-run media reported on Monday.

The two men, both in their twenties, are accused of spreading a rumor online that some 5,000 police officers and 100 police vehicles were seen guarding a wedding convoy in the city of Changsha on Tuesday. They also posted a video clip which showed a large number of police officers and a wedding convoy.

But authorities, who called the incident a 'coincidence', claim the police officers were simply returning from a training drill and happened to be passing the wedding convoy at that moment. The state-run Xinhua news agency said the rumor spread quickly, with the video receiving large numbers of hits.

The pair responsible for posting the information and the video were arrested in Changsha on Sunday, Xinhua said. The report quoted police officials as saying that the men will be detained for a total of five days in accordance with relevant laws.

The Chinese government has vowed in recent months to crack down on 'false information' being spread online. Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblogging service which is similar to Twitter, recently agreed to set up so-called 'rumor-crushing teams' to delete false information from its website.

In September, the number of Chinese citizens who have access to the internet surpassed half a billion, representing an increase of more than 15 million in just two months. The Asian country, which has a total population of 1.3 billion, has more internet users than any other country in the world.

Nonetheless, the infamous 'Great Firewall of China' still severely restricts access to web users. Restrictions are imposed on foreign news websites, pornography, political commentary, pro-democracy websites, and other politically sensitive subjects such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

-- © BNO News All rights reserved 2011-12-12

[maidu]

knee jerk reaction from a hyper paranoid part of the world. All the ugly crap the Chinese are laying on their citizens will turn in to a big brown dragon and bite them on their collective politburo butts. The sooner the better.

[elgato]

"The Chinese government has vowed in recent months to crack down on 'false information' being spread online"

It's a good thing ThaVisa doesn't operate in China!

[Steely Dan]

"The Chinese government has vowed in recent months to crack down on 'false information' being spread online"

It's a good thing ThaVisa doesn't operate in China!

Isn't it just.

[SAffer]

What exactly am I missing here?

The guys see a whole lot of cops who appear to be guarding a wedding... take a video and post it (whatever for???), and are arrested because they were wrong about what the police were really doing??

Is that the gist of it??

I don't get it.

[elgato]

Maybe some of the cops in the video were supposed to be somewhere else

[maidu]

What exactly am I missing here?

The guys see a whole lot of cops who appear to be guarding a wedding... take a video and post it (whatever for???), and are arrested because they were wrong about what the police were really doing??

Is that the gist of it??

I don't get it.

You don't have to 'get it.' It doesn't have to make any sense whatsoever. Oppression hits hard and fast in China. Lots of things that you and I would find benign, petty, unimportant or silly, are taken very seriously by Chinese politburo paranoid heavies. It's a country which charges the family of executed people for the bullet which killed them. I don't think you can get much more black-hearted than that.