In the latest drive, authorities have closed 110 websites and more than 3,300 accounts on China-based social networking services, and deleted more than 200,000 items containing pornography since January, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday. It also follows a move last year to purge online rumour-mongering, widely seen as a tool to punish critics of the ruling Communist Party, which has chilled political disclosure especially on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Sina Corp, a major Chinese web portal, temporarily shut down its entire online reading section shortly after the campaign was launched, because “works containing inappropriate content have appeared,” the company said in a statement on one of its Weibo microblogs. Last week, a Beijing court sentenced a man to three years in prison for spreading rumours on Weibo that the court said defamed celebrities and the government.
