Microblog tweets that are critical of the Chinese government are only rumors, and rumors are bad, bad, bad — just like the posters denouncing people during the Cultural Revolution, says an influential Chinese Communist Party journal.

“The internet is full of all kinds of negative news and critical voices saying the government only does bad things and everything it says is wrong.”

The magazine said online rumours were no better than “big character posters”, hand-written signs put up in public places during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution to spread propaganda, often denouncing people and institutions as counter-revolutionary or bourgeois.

The journal article continues the current leadership’s crackdown on “rumor-mongering” on China’s versions of Twitter, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. Users of both platforms have used their microblogs to criticize government corruption and mismanagement, and have often named names in the process.

China’s new president, Xi Jinping, recently called on China’s censors to clean up the Internet, and a particularly outspoken and popular Weibo user, Charles Xue Biqun, was arrested last month on sex crime charges. He appeared on national TV Sunday to confess to spreading irresponsible comments on Sina Weibo, saying that “free speech cannot override the law.”

There are some similarities to the Cultural Revolution, after all, just not in the way the party journal Qiushi means. Xue is clearly being used as an example of what might happen if you piss off the Party by saying too much.

More about Xue here. news.yahoo.com

More about the journal article here: Online Rumours Like Cultural Revolution Denunciation Posters, Says Party Journal