China bans anti-Islam words on Net

Phrases used online to stigmatise Muslims banned by authorities

“Islamophobic” terms used by Chinese internet users to stigmatise Muslims have been blocked by authorities to prevent bias against Islam, official media reported on Thursday.

China has over 21 million Muslims mostly the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Hui community in Ningxia province, according to unofficial accounts.

“The Islamophobic terms invented by Chinese Internet users to stigmatise Muslims have been blocked by authorities on Chinese social media despite criticism

from the netizens that such a ban overtly favourable to Muslim minorities,” state-run Global Times reported.

As a result of the ban, searches for “green religion” and “peaceful religion”, often used by Internet users to refer to

Islam and to circumvent censorship of inappropriate online speech, showed no results on China’s Weibo microblog on Wednesday, the report said.

Posts containing the phrases cannot be posted for “violations of Weibo’s complaints related rules.” Insults against Islam are also blocked in Weibo’s search engine, it said.

China which has a booming Internet population surpassing over 700 million, uses massive firewalls to block any content the government and the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), deems offending and not in the country’s interest.

International social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook as well as Google are blocked by the firewalls.

The ban came after an alleged brawl involving Muslim people at a toll booth went viral.