The Chinese Communist Party launched a new app that reportedly targets those who badmouths the party, attempt to question the "official version" of China's history as dictated by the CCP, as well as engage in what the party deems as "misinformation."
According to Summit News, this new app comes also with a website. These were recently unveiled by the China's Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).
Upon the launching, authorities urged users to contribute an "active role" of helping identify "malicious people distorting facts and confusing" others.
"For a while now, some people with ulterior motives...have spread historically nihilistic false statements online, maliciously distorting, slandering and denying Party, national and military history in an attempt to confuse people's thinking," states the announcement.
The announcement reiterates the mandate by stating that they hope for most internet users to play an active role in "supervising society."
Summit also noted that China is already running a rigid social credit score system which can anytime be frozen to cripple people's access to transportation and other basic services. The ban applies to minor infractions like jaywalking or buying too much junk food.
Didi Rankovic of Reclaim the Net also reported that the latest tool serves as a "hotline" for citizens to use in reporting anyone caught slandering the ruling communist Party.
Rankovic wrote that this should no longer be surprising given the CCPs preoccupation in expanding their power through any means including control over internet infrastructure for the advancement of their policies.
"And it's also unsurprising because it comes ahead of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CPP), when messages and narratives will have to be kept particularly "clean,"" he added.
Rankovic went on to say that the CCP-ruled state has always encouraged its citizens to report each other. Now that they have a new hotline in the form of an app, authorities can efficiently enforce more restrictive rules as well as push further their political ideologies.
According to The Daily Mail, many netizens in China have already been arrested and imprisoned for posting contents online that criticize the party. The stipulated jail time for those marked guilty is up to three years.
Last week, a 19-year-old man in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu was reportedly detained by the authorities for posting "insulting" comments online about Japan's occupancy in Nanjing in the late 1930s.
Chinese social media sites are also not immune from the government's retributions whenever they fail to censor contents that 'slander' the party. They will either pay fines or their services suspended.
Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that there probably won't be a "massive engagement with the hotline."
"Domestically within China, this is probably going to be ignored by most as just something that they don't want to get involved with," Kennedy told Newsweek. "That that type of demand for political expression is not something that Chinese want [because] it's highly risky.
In February, a New York Times report embedded a link to a public Google sheet that list all speech crimes in China. Wang, the person behind the spreadsheet has been collecting and exposing cases of the communist's government's violations of its citizens right to free speech.
