Chinese Authorities Ban Crypto Media Via WeChat In China

By Dmitriy

BTC Wires: Chinese authorities have banned blockchain and crypto-based accounts from popular messaging service, WeChat. Firms that have been most notably affected by this move are Jinse, supported by venture company Node Capital, and Deepchain, a website backed by a number of coins. Their official WeChat accounts don’t show any of their previous articles anymore. Instead, there’s is simply a text post stating that the account has been banned.

The post reads:

“Due to users’ complaints and after the platform’s examinations, the account is found to violate ‘Temporary Regulations on the Development and Management of Public Information Services for Instant Messaging Tools’ and all contents have been banned. The account has been prohibited for use.”

The very same text is also displayed on the pages of the media accounts held by Huobi News and CoinDaily as well.

While it isn’t clear yet why these accounts have been targetted, speculations suggest that China’s new regulations may have had a role to play.

The new set of regulations for users of instant messaging services had been released and executed by Chinese regulatory authorities on 7 Aug. According to one of the guidelines in the publication, the base of the crackdown on these accounts is that they, among all other users of such instant messaging apps that work to provide “public information services”, need to follow “relevant laws and regulations”, and these pages have been found guilty of violating this rule. The publication stated:

“For instant messaging service users who violate the agreement, the instant messaging service provider shall take measures such as warning, restriction, suspension, and closure until the account is closed, meanwhile saving the relevant records and fulfilling the obligation to report to the relevant authority.”

Earlier this year, the government-run media source of the country, People’s Daily, threw direct shade at blockchain and other crypto-basef media outlets in China, claiming that such media sources were often fraudulent and, through information scamming and other procedures, helped manipulate the crypto-market.

Founder and CEO of Huobi News, Jun Du, was one of the individuals mentioned by name as a “classic example” of the issue.