#tieba

South Park Completely Banned From Chinese Internet After ‘Band in China’ Episode, Trey & Matt Issue “Apology”

via TheHollywoodReporter:

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone probably saw this coming, and to their credit, simply didn't care.

The most recent episode of South Park, "Band in China," has been generating loads of media attention for its sharp critique of the way Hollywood tends to shape its content to avoid offending Chinese government censors in any way whatsoever.

Now, those very same government censors, in the real world, have lashed back at South Park by deleting virtually every clip, episode and online discussion of the show from Chinese streaming services, social media and even fan pages.

A cursory perusal through China's highly regulated Internet landscape shows the show conspicuously absent everywhere it recently had a presence. A search of the Twitter-like social media service Weibo turns up not a single mention of South Park among the billions of past posts. On streaming service Youku, owned by Internet giant Alibaba, all links to clips, episodes and even full seasons of the show are now dead.

And on Baidu's Tieba, China's largest online discussions platform, the threads and sub-threads related to South Park are nonfunctional. If users manually type in the URL for what was formerly the South Park thread, a message appears saying that, "According to the relevant law and regulation, this section is temporarily not open."

[... ] On Monday afternoon, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone issued a statement with a faux apology about the ban.

A brief introduction of the traditional fanfic activity of Nejiten Tieba (宁天吧）. (Baidu Tieba is one of the most important Chinese fandom sites.) Starting from 2007, the Tieba of Nejiten has successfully maintained yearly fanfic contests in which participants create Nejiten stories according to the themes or elements assigned.

2007: Fanfic of random pairings (not limited to Nejiten XD)

2008: Lottery of different styles (happy ending, heartbreaking story, etc.)

2009: Random elements (Flower shop, Hyuga compound, etc.)

2010: Three-round contest (wow): Summer shimmer/ Lantern lights/ Sleepless Black cat

2011: Stories of Summertime

2012: Soap Opera elements/ Songfics

2013: Lottery of single Chinese character/ colors

2014: The song of four seasons

2015: You are my eyes

2016: Eternal summer

The contests in recent years have produced some of the best Nejiten fanfics that I have ever read. And we intend to keep the tradition this year as well! The themes for this year’s contest are not yet decided, so feel free to contribute ideas! If by any chance, some of you are also interested in participating, I’d be more than happy to help with translation. (if it’s within my language capacity...)

Baidu to stop commercialization of medical forums following scandal

Baidu, China’s largest search engine, announced on Tuesday that it will cease all business collaborations on its disease-related online forums on Tieba, the company’s community-based group discussion service.

The decision came after Baidu found itself in the midst of scandal, whereby it was accused of profiting by selling the forums to unauthorized hospitals and companies.

“All disease-related forums will halt business collaborations from now on, and will only be open to authorized non-profit organizations. Baidu will not allow any frauds on the Tieba platform,” read the announcement on Baidu’s official Sina Weibo account.

The commercialization of Baidu’s medical forums were largely condemned by netizens, after a user nicknamed “Mayicai” accused the online giant of selling its hemophilia forum to some unqualified “experts”.

According to Mayicai, the hemophilia forum used to be the most famous online community for thousands of hemophilia patients across China. As one of the former hosts of the forum, he and other hosts have been devotedly sharing disease-related knowledge and removing unauthorized advertising posts.

But their efforts were all ruined the instant the forum was sold. Mayicai said all the original hosts were banned by the new host, and the once restrained advertising posts again flooded the forum.

Talking about why he stood out exposing the case, Mayicai said he couldn’t allow fellow patients to be cheated of great sums of money, and even their lives, by the frauds. “I would have given up if it were an unimportant forum, but this is a medical forum,” said Mayicai.

Meanwhile, more disease-related Tieba forums were revealed by netizens of having been sold to unauthorized organizations seeking profits, like the Parkinson’s disease forum and the high blood pressure forums.

According to Xinhua, Baidu Tieba has a total of one billion registered users, with 300 million being active users, in 19 million different forums.

Earlier, Baidu was also accused of allowing private hospitals to attract patients through its paid listing services, which gave priority listing to the websites to these hospitals during searches.

Netizens have been expressing their anger over the commercialization of disease-related forums.

On Zhihu, China’s Quara-like Q&A platform, a user nicknamed “Galiji”, who’s also a doctor, said it’s horrible that the biggest search engine in China, the authority in most ordinary Chinese people’s eyes, is not able to provide the most reliable information. His answer has received over 14,000 likes in two days.

Baidu replaced the operator of the hemophilia forum with Hemophilia Home of China (HHC), an NGO dedicated to helping hemophilia patients, making HHC the first NGO to run a disease-related forum, the company said.

"The operator of the hemophilia forum should be an objective and professional nonprofit organization, instead of a stakeholder," the Global Times quoted Guan Tao, founder of HHC and a hemophilia patient, as saying.

Noting that China currently has 100,000 hemophilia patients, Guan said that the participation of professional public organizations could provide patients with better medical information, so it is worth promoting Baidu's collaboration with professional NGOs in the running of its forums.  

Apart from cooperating with HHC, Baidu said it has also reached forum operation cooperation agreements with several public organizations, including China Charities Aid Foundation for Children, Chinese Organizations for Rare Disorders, and Chinese Red Cross Foundation.