Updated 14:17 am 16 April 2018: Weibo has issued a second statement today to exclude gay-themed contents from the three-month purge. Now the “Cleaning Up” campaign only targets vulgar and violent contents.
Chinese popular social networking platform Weibo announced that they would remove gay-themed contents from its platform (in Chinese), prompting a storm of online protests.
To comply with China’s new cybersecurity law, the Twitter-like micro-blogging service said that they will launch a three-month “clean-up” campaign to filter comics, games, and related short videos and picture/text posts that involve pornography, violence or homosexuality. The statement added that the crackdown covers all contents related to “gay” and “danmei (耽美), China’s version of what is often called “slash” fiction. Weibo claims that it has removed over 56,000 posts and closed over a hundred accounts involving “illegal” content.
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