胡泳 | Rumor Fever
December 12, 2011, 8:23 AM Rumor Fever By DAVID BANDURSKI HONG KONG — China hosts some 300 million microblog accounts (including my own ), and officials say that domestic social media put out more than 200 million posts every day. In hopes of getting a handle on this potentially threatening surge of information, the government has started a campaign that aims to quash what it calls “rumors” — statements that it says threaten the public order but that it has not bothered to define. After a series of public opinion disasters this past year, the Communist Party has been pressuring social media providers to weed out allegations it finds threatening, and state media have tried to whip up fear over their malignant social effects. The party’s fever over rumors began in August, following the July 23 high-speed rail collision in Wenzhou. The government took a public opinion beating over the crash , in large part because social media harnessed anger over the bungled rescue effort, the safety of the high-speed rail network and corruption in the Railways Ministry. Once party leaders wrested back control of the story, they pushed all relevant facts into the darkness, leaving only rumors to sate the public’s appetite for the truth.
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