China Banning Anonymous Online Accounts after 3/1

[Charlie]

Some of you may have already heard this news, but in case you haven’t: Chinese government moves to ban anonymous online accounts starting March 1st

This is pretty similar to something that happened a few years ago where in 2012 the National People’s Congress approved a rule to require websites that host user-generated content to verify the real identity of users.

If you don’t have your Chinese social media accounts registered (Weibo, Weixin, etc), now will be a good time to do that. Although in the case of Weixin in particular, they likely have all of our identities anyway unless you have anonymously purchased your SIM card, since that verification is required I believe.

More interestingly, would requiring your real identity keep you off of Chinese social networks, or not be of concern to you? I don’t post anything sensitive on social networks here but at the same time I don’t think I would bother registering with a restriction like this. Tough times for the Chinese internet.

[Rick in China]

Personally I’m not concerned. It’d be nice to have some sort of warning or request from any sites that may implement the policy so at least users don’t get banned without realizing they have some action to do to remain a user under that account, or decide not to continue with the service..

[Pk_c]

Wow , they were indeed talking about it last year already however I was never forced to enter any personal information into weibo, but looks like this time it’s gonna happen, it’s crazy that there is no warning about this on weibo already.

Anyway I don’t see how that’s gonna work, it will probably be very easy to provide  fake ID / Adresse ect… if you really want to stay anonymous.

[Charlie]

I think what they’re likely to do (since there are already hundreds of millions of social media accounts in China) is enforce this restriction on newly-registered accounts only. It’ll still probably be pretty easy to get around, regardless.

[Rick in China]

I just tried to join a group with 107 members on weixin, requires wechat wallet added card & ID information.. and it validates of course..

[Charlie]

Rick in China wrote:

I just tried to join a group with 107 members on weixin, requires wechat wallet added card & ID information.. and it validates of course..

Whoa… requires WeChat wallet then you know for sure it’s 100% verified information. I couldn’t even get my real bank card to work with WeChat wallet (I now understand that expats have to be using Merchants Bank or one of the other few banks that will work for us).

[Rick in China]

I’m using Merchants Bank and it would not verify me, said name or ID was wrong.. I’m almost positive it was the correct passport registered to the bank account but will have to check! It said though, that the # of characters in the PPT# was incorrect or something similar so I am thinking their validation rules may be tied to Chinese standard identification or something, will update on that when/if it gets sorted.

[Author]

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