China’s internet censor shuts financial news aggregator wallstreetcn.com amid worsening US relations over trade and tech
- Company behind app was fined in March by internet watchdog for posting news without obtaining a licence to operate as an internet news service
China’s internet regulator ordered the closure of wallstreetcn.com, one of the country’s most popular aggregator of financial news, saying that its “Wall Street News” service was in breach of cybersecurity laws.
“Wallstreetcn.com has severely violated rules under Chinese cybersecurity law. Please cut off internet access to the app and report related feedback after it takes effect,” said a June 10 government order that was sent to the bureau responsible for information communication under the ministry of industry and information technology.
Wallstreetcn.com issued a statement confirming the closure at 11pm, and said the company will carefully implement a comprehensive “self correction, improve its management and staff quality” and try to resume services as soon as possible.
Images of the government order circulated online show that it carries the stamp of China’s internet watchdog, the Cyber Administration of China (CAC). The order did not specify what the app had done, nor whether the suspension from internet access would be temporary or permanent.
Still, the shutdown of wallstreetcn.com followed a crackdown of China’s social media amid a deterioration in US-China relations, which has spilled over from the year-long trade war into an assault of Chinese technology.
The dragnet had also extended to WeChat, the 1-billion strong social network operated by Tencent Holdings. The US-China trade war was one of the most censored topics of 2018 on the WeChat app, according to research published in February.
WeChatscope – a research project at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre – tracked more than 4,000 public accounts covering daily news on the app throughout 2018 to analyse WeChat censorship.
Researchers found that about 11,000 of the 1.04 million articles reviewed on WeChatscope had been censored. Among the top 10 most censored topics, three were related to the flaring tensions between the US and China: the prolonged trade war, US sanctions against ZTE and the arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou.
Wallstreetcn.com is a popular finance news aggregator known for its growing readership, especially among the country’s stock traders, who operate as many as 148 million accounts between them, more than the known membership of the Communist Party.
The aggregator, which delivers its news over smartphone apps, uses push notifications to alert readers about breaking financial news and analysis.
However, the app has been entangled in disputes with many news organisations including Bloomberg, Caixin and Dow Jones involving copyright violations.
In March, the Shanghai office of CAC issued the company a fine for illegally posting news without obtaining a licence to operate as an internet news service. The company has also been charged for misleading users and disrupting “online news order”.
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Users can open the app on their smartphones, but the column of real-time news does not load, with a service operation warning of “weak network signal”. The online version of the website failed to load too.
The app, which is available in iOS and Android download channels, is described as having 180 million users globally.
The company was founded by a Chinese financial journalist in 2013 and has successfully completed three rounds of fundraising.
The app has won backing from ByteDance and China Media Capital, according to media reports, although no information on the size of the investments was made public. In an emailed response, Bytedance said it had “no investment” in the shuttered news aggregator.
