Yesterday, police in Xi’an announced the arrest of a 33-year-old woman for rumor mongering. Her crime? Posting a video claiming that it was snowing in Xi’an, when in fact it was not. In a notice posted to WeChat, local police accused the woman, identified only by her surname Liu, of “confusing the public” to “deleterious effect” in a misguided effort to earn attention online. She was placed under administrative detention for an unspecified period of time. According to Red Star News, a Chengdu-based digital outlet, the detained woman was not the only person to post false claims of a snowfall in Xi’an on that day. The most popular of those videos garnered over 3,000 likes, nearly 2,000 comments, and 8,360 reposts. It was unclear why Liu was apparently the only person detained. In May 2023, a man in Hebei was arrested for the exact same reason—falsely claiming it was snowing in his city—and was later subjected to “strict education-through-criticism” and forced to sign an “Internet with Integrity” pledge.
Both cases sparked broad criticism of China’s tight internet speech controls. In an essay published to WeChat, one author argued against arresting people for online speech, and noted the similarity of the Xi’an snow-video arrest to the zero-COVID-era crackdowns on online “rumor mongers”:
This is all pretty terrifying. Even a minor slip-up could easily be construed as illegal. What if one day you jokingly say, “Tomorrow the sun will rise in the west,” and someone posts a video of it online? That would be grounds to arrest you.
[…] Those with good memories should remember the Chengdu [netizen] “Tropical Rainforest,” the man who posted about an imminent COVID lockdown. His post caused people to rush to the supermarket to stock up on essentials. He was detained for 15 days and fined 1,000 yuan.
Two days later, local officials issued a notice mandating that all citizens quarnatine at home and avoid leaving the city unless strictly necessary.
Even though the city officials used different words, everyone knew that [Tropical Rainforest] had not been spreading rumors. Nonetheless, this did not change the fact of his arrest for rumor-mongering.
If a phrase as trivial as “It’s snowing in Xi’an” crosses a legal red line, then any jests or inadvertent remarks made by ordinary Internet users could easily become “legal pitfalls.”[Chinese]
Arrests over online attention-seeking related to false claims are quite common. Other recent examples include the arrest of a Hunan man for “bullshitting,” after he claimed to be among the first to ride a new Ferris wheel. In an April article for the South China Morning Post, Xinlu Liang wrote about a recent campaign by the Ministry of Public Security against “online rumors” that saw over 1,500 bloggers arrested:
The ministry has imposed administrative penalties on about 10,700 people and debunked more than 4,200 rumors since it launched the campaign last December, according to a Tuesday report by People’s Daily. The numbers were first released on Saturday on the official WeChat account of the ministry’s cybersecurity office.
[…] The latest round focused on social media, live-streaming and short-video platforms, where the ministry shut down 63,000 illegal accounts and cleaned up more than 735,000 posts that contained rumors, according to the WeChat post.
[…] The public security ministry has imposed more than 590 administrative penalties on websites and platforms since the campaign started in December, according to its WeChat post. [Source]
