Baidu, Sohu get caught in Chinese net clampdown

China’s cyberspace police have ordered Baidu and Sohu-.com to suspend a plethora of news services for a week, kicking off an online clean-up campaign with two of the country’s biggest Internet corporations.

The Cyberspace Administration of China on Thursday announced it was starting a six-month effort to eradicate “vulgar” information” from a plethora of online media, including messaging services and livestreaming platforms. The Beijing branch of the watchdog said it summoned executives from both firms and ordered several of Baidu’s and Sohu’s news and content feeds to suspend updates from January 3 to January 10 while they root out undesirable content.

Neither the companies nor the regulator stipulated exactly why they were being punished, nor what’s needed to resume operations. But Beijing has increasingly taken a hard line as the country’s Internet ecosystem flourishes, instigating crackdowns on video games and social media that’ve hurt industry leaders such as WeChat-operator Tencent Holdings and Bytedance. They represent the most severe digital crackdown in the country’s history, shuttering services or temporarily forcing them from app stores for spreading everything from crude jokes to banned information.


The CAC will “severely investigate and close a number of illegal websites and accounts, effectively curbing harmful information,” the regulator said in a statement, adding it was targeting 12 types of “illegal internet information” in its latest drive.