China’s cyberspace watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China, announced on Saturday the launch of a two-month campaign aimed at improving the online environment for minors. The campaign focuses on addressing negative content, including fake videos about campus bullying, to create a more positive and secure online environment for young people.
China’s campaign for online safety of minors is a two months long agenda to safeguard children online during the summer vacation.
This campaign targets e-commerce predators and inappropriate content, specifically aiming to combat those who exploit child models for indecent poses and redirect juveniles to third-party platforms under the pretext of selling animated series and video games, which often expose them to pornographic and violent content.
The campaign also focuses on the sale of products such as stationery and scale models of popular animation characters that may be pornographic in nature, sold via e-commerce platforms.
This crackdown follows a controversy from last year when China Central Television revealed that e-commerce platforms were selling nude scale model toys to children aged 7 to 14, leading to the discovery of nine online companies involved in this misconduct through subsequent investigations.
The cyberspace administration emphasized the need to strengthen control measures to prevent small companies from secretly marketing inappropriate products to children.
A woman surnamed Zhao, the mother of a 10-year-old girl from Nanjing, Jiangsu province, expressed her vigilance by carefully inspecting online stationery purchases and avoiding blind boxes to protect her child from exposure to adult content and violence.
A report by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China and the China Internet Network Information Center revealed that the number of juvenile internet users surpassed 193 million in 2022, with internet penetration among juveniles increasing from 93.7 percent in 2018 to 97.2 percent in 2022.
The report also noted that over 95 percent of primary school children are now online, highlighting the potential hazards of early internet usage.
Zhu Wei pointed out that younger children have poorer judgment and self-control abilities. He mentioned that some parents, for convenience, hand over their accounts to children, making juvenile modes for app downloads and content browsing ineffective.
Zhu stressed the importance of parental responsibility in preventing minors from becoming addicted to or confused by the internet.
The campaign also includes measures to crack down on cyber manhunts and the counterfeiting of apps popular among minors by using similar logos and names. China’s campaign for online safety of minors aims to enhance the quality of their vacations by creating a safer and more protected internet environment.
