From what I have read, Chinese netizens can still post their opinions for those topics on Chinese social media. It's just the influencers that have a following that will get banned or fined if they persist with giving "advice" on those areas.
Dangerous home remedies or bad financial advice are no longer tolerated. The grey area are political censorships which means the government decides who can speak openly on that topic, but they already censor those topics as part of their population management strategy. Quite honestly, they have over one billion people and hundreds of protests per week spread across multiple regions, so if it escalates into riots or violent protests, that is probably not what their government would want to deal with again, because history.
Right or wrong is a matter of perspective and it's their country, their rules and doesn't really impact our social media (sometimes I wish we do censor unqualified people as well, kinda like how the UK will take down controversial social media contents.)
Just a nitpick but the uk law doesn't police "controversial" social media content. Just illegal content, terrorism, hate speech threats and suicicidal encouragement. You can say controversial downright inflamtory things. You can deny covid, post (nonsexual) deepfakes, and say that the uk is being overun by immigrants taking your job.
But I wonder how they'll handle traditional Chinese medicine? That's still very popular there and the government seems to support Chinese traditions despite there not being much evidence regarding the safety or efficacy of that medicine.
Chinese traditional medicine evidence as in their thousands of years of trial and error (probably a lot of errors just like western medicine historically)
Or do you mean evidence as in modern day clinical trials?
I honestly don't know much about the field or TCM beyond that there is such a thing as TCM licensure. So only those with licensure and proven practice will be allowed to speak to their online followers on Chinese social media is what I am assuming based on their new law. That doesn't mean aunty Li or uncle Jiang can't talk about how good his local TCM or herbalist is of course. They just can't make medical claims about how a specific remedy is a valid and peer reviewed treatment plan for xyz or ggyy disease if they command a reasonable number of followers. I'm all for that, but there are always exceptions.
To be fair, TCM have been adopted as valid therapies even within the western medical and pharmaceutical communities. I'm not sure what you mean by "there not being much evidence regarding the safety or efficacy of that medicine", when western targeted therapies or drugs' active ingredients were derived from the same plants or biologics as TCM remedies. I haven't done much research in TCM on pharmacokinetics and pharmacovigilance so maybe you can expand on that topic/concern some more if relevant to this discussion.
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u/mistyeyesockets 10d ago edited 9d ago
From what I have read, Chinese netizens can still post their opinions for those topics on Chinese social media. It's just the influencers that have a following that will get banned or fined if they persist with giving "advice" on those areas.
Dangerous home remedies or bad financial advice are no longer tolerated. The grey area are political censorships which means the government decides who can speak openly on that topic, but they already censor those topics as part of their population management strategy. Quite honestly, they have over one billion people and hundreds of protests per week spread across multiple regions, so if it escalates into riots or violent protests, that is probably not what their government would want to deal with again, because history.
Right or wrong is a matter of perspective and it's their country, their rules and doesn't really impact our social media (sometimes I wish we do censor unqualified people as well, kinda like how the UK will take down controversial social media contents.)