Online forums are for public discussions

AMID GROWING concern over their excessive commercialization, Baidu pledged on Tuesday to stop monetizing all of its illness-related forums on Tieba, an online community-based group discussion service, and said it will invite non-profit organizations to run these online discussion groups. The Chinese search engine giant has reportedly sold the operation of a number of online forums to unqualified hospitals even local governments via third-party companies. Beijing News questions some governments' desire to run such online forums:

It is understandable that some local governments want to gauge netizens' opinions on local affairs, but their intervention is likely to be at the cost of sincere public participation if their involvement is known.

That many local Tieba groups are popular among Chinese netizens has little to do with governments' so-called guidance. Instead, it is more a result of netizens' attempts to exchange information on a variety of social issues, especially sensitive and unconfirmed information that can hardly be found in the news, such as natural disasters and scandals concerning officials.