China’s Internet censorship body has warned online media not to use stories found on social networks as the basis of news reports without first asking permission from the authorities. The Cyberspace Administration of China said: “It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts.”

According to a story in the South China Morning Post: "No website is allowed to report public news without specifying the sources, or report news that quotes untrue origins."

The latest crackdown on Internet media comes just days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the guardian of China’s online world. The SCMP notes: “Xu is regarded as one of President Xi Jinping’s key supporters,” and this move is seen as a further tightening of Xi’s grip on cyberspace.

Back in February, Ars reported on new regulations that made it much harder for Western media to operate in China. Before that, wide-ranging powers were introduced in 2015 to increase the authorities' control over the Internet in the country.

The SCMP quoted the official Chinese government news site Xinhua as saying: “All websites should bear the key responsibility to further streamline the course of reporting and publishing of news, and set up a sound internal monitoring mechanism among all mobile news portals [and the social media chat websites] Weibo or WeChat.”

The central online censorship body has ordered its regional offices to increase supervision and to “severely punish fake news or news that deviated from the facts.” That applies even to China’s Internet giants. The Cyberspace Administration of China says that several outlets have already been “punished and given warnings for fabricating news before distributing it.”

However, as with all such repressive policies in China, it remains to be seen how strictly the new rules are enforced, or whether they are largely for show and to encourage online news outlets to be circumspect.