Sina pledges to ensure authenticity of online information
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Xinhua, September 13, 2011
Popular Internet portal Sina has pledged to ensure the authenticity of the information it provides online and commit to the "spread of advanced culture."
In a proposal posted on its website, Sina said that authenticity and the "spread of advanced culture" are important for the healthy and orderly development of the company's microblogging service and its whole Internet businesses.
It called on other online media companies to employ content supervisors.
Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblogging service in terms of the number of registered users, will be included in the company's efforts to "eradicate online falsehoods and harmful information."
Sina currently employs a team of 15 supervisors to screen its Weibo microblogging service and plans to expand the size of the team, according to a weekend report by Qianlong.com, a news website administered by the Beijing municipal authorities.
Sina's supervisory team is created and managed by the company, although the team's work is considered to be independent from the portal's news reporting department, according to the report.
The supervisors' responsibilities include monitoring "harmful information" and collecting and analyzing customer complaints about the company's services.
Sina took the lead in setting up its internal supervisory team by selecting supervisors from its user base, choosing those users who demonstrated great interest in helping the company to improve the authenticity of the information it provides through Weibo.
Sina Weibo said in August that microbloggers who are found to be posting messages containing false information will have their accounts suspended for one month. The warning came after a top official's visit to the Sina office.
During his visit in August, Liu Qi, secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), urged Internet companies to stop the spread of "false and harmful information" and to "ensure the authenticity of information and create a healthy online media atmosphere," the Beijing Daily reported on Aug. 23.
With 485 million users, China is home to the world's largest number of registered netizens. The rising popularity of microblogging services has allowed this segment of the country's population to voice their opinions in a way that has never been seen before in China.
The number of Chinese microbloggers reached 195 million by the end of June, a stunning increase of 208.9 percent over the number recorded around the end of 2010, according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center.
