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Zhejiang plans to ban human flesh searches

By Jamie Quan (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-05-28 17:36

Zhejiang province plans legislation against spreading, revising or deleting other people’s information on the Internet, ynxxb.com reported Friday.

The proposed Zhejiang Informationization Promotion Bill that aims to ban malicious human flesh search needs to be discussed and passed by the National People’s Congress before it becomes effective.

A human flesh search is effectively the same as what is known in the West as "crowd sourcing": Thousands of individual netizens piece together every detail of a person's life and then publish them online.

Similar rules in East China’s Jiangsu province in 2009 had aroused a dispute over civil rights. Some Internet users said they use human flesh searches to keep tabs on government officials and this kind of law can block the transparency for public interest, according to ynxxb.com.