Lawmaker's call for a clean cyberspace for minors turned into actions

Updated: 2023-02-03

Song Wenxin, a four-time deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC) and vice-president of Taishan Cultural Industry Secondary School in East China's Shandong province, has made the utmost efforts to protect the healthy growth of minors in cyberspace.

Nowadays, minors have easier access to the internet and are better prepared to visit the cyberspace. In recent years, the rise of We-media, also known as self-media, has provided users with increasingly complicated and diversified information, while regulation and management of the sector lags behind.

Song said that it is an issue to be solved by the whole of society on how to build a healthy cyberspace for the minors in terms of content and platform operations.

During the first session of the 13th NPC in March 2018, she tabled a suggestion to strengthen the regulation of online content and build a clean cyberspace for minors.

She noted in the suggestion that the accessibility of various information on the internet is having an increasingly profound impact upon minors' worldview. Meanwhile, the openness and inclusiveness of the internet, along with Inadequate management, has brought additional difficulties for competent departments to better regulate the cyberspace.

Therefore, Song called for the regulation of internet services from legal, administrative, economic, and industrial perspectives and stressed that service providers should work closely with competent departments to produce more healthy contents that are displayed in vivid forms and are appealing to minors.

Since then, competent departments have fully studied her suggestion and taken concrete actions to promote the building of a clean cyberspace for minors.

The Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission launched a nationwide campaign to purify the online environment that last for eight months in 2021. It has also unveiled a series of regulations and rules to step up management of online content, including the regulations on protecting personal information of minors in cyberspace and regulations on strengthening the management of the online environment.

Moreover, the newly-revised law on the protection of minors, which took effect on June 1, 2021, has set up a special chapter on the protection of minors in the cyberspace. It has made comprehensive specifications on the guiding principles of protecting the legitimate rights and interests of minors, the management of the online environment, corporate responsibilities, cyberspace information management, the protection of personal information, and the prevention and control of internet addiction.


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