Cyberspace authority moves to protect minors

Actions focus on prominent issues such as illegal, harmful information

The Cyberspace Administration of China will focus on rectifying prominent issues such as fabricating and disseminating illegal and harmful information, and generating explicit content with new technologies and applications, to continually create a clean cyberspace, officials from the CAC said at a news conference in Beijing on Friday.

The actions also aim at promoting the implementation of the recently issued Regulations on the Protection of Minors in Cyberspace, which was approved in September during the 15th executive meeting of the State Council, and officially published on Oct 16. These regulations will take effect on Jan 1.

Wang Song, deputy director of the CAC, said that the regulation responds to the concerns of various sectors of society regarding the protection of minors in the online environment and marks a new phase in China's legal framework for the protection of minors in cyberspace.

The internet has become the primary space for minors in their learning and daily lives. While minors enjoy convenient and enriched learning and life experiences through the internet, they also face various risks, including exposure to illegal and harmful information, personal information leakage, online addiction and cyberbullying, he said.

To standardize online information content, various regulatory measures have been introduced, such as those for internet news information services, governance of online information content ecosystems, user account information management, and information content algorithm recommendation management, further establishing the institutional requirements for regulating online illegal and harmful information, he said.

The recently approved document includes a dedicated section to regulate online information content, specifically identifying information that is beneficial for the healthy growth of minors. This information includes promoting core socialist values, advanced socialist culture, revolutionary culture and China's excellent traditional culture, as well as information for creating a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation, nurturing patriotic feelings and good moral conduct among minors.

It further specifies measures for the regulation of online information content that could harm the physical and mental health of minors. Such content includes material that promotes obscenity, pornography, violence, cults, superstition, gambling, self-harm or suicide, terrorism, separatism and extremism. It explicitly states that no organization or individual may produce, reproduce, publish or disseminate such content.

Providers of online education network products and services that target minors should offer corresponding products and services according to the mental and cognitive capabilities and developmental stages of minors, it required.

The CAC will actively cooperate with all other sectors of life to build a pattern of online protection for minors involving the participation of the government, schools, families, society and other parties, and intensify online law enforcement to punish all types of illegal information, Wang said.

Li Changxi, head of the law-based cyberspace governance bureau of the CAC, said that in recent years there has been significant social concern about issues such as minors becoming addicted to online games and short videos, suffering from cyberbullying and engaging in irrational online consumption.

To address these problems, the CAC and other relevant departments have each introduced management regulations and undertaken a series of specific actions to enhance law enforcement efforts, rectifying the issues of minors being provided with online game account rental services in violation of regulations and maliciously spreading rumors or slandering minors, Li said.