Baidu Also Imposes Anti-Crypto Measures

| Publish date: 08/28/2018
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Baidu, the Chinese technology major, has joined Tencent and Alibaba by imposing anti-crypto measures in accordance with the government’s tougher stance.

Restricting Crypto-Related Topics

The “Chinese Google” Baidu has closed some of the popular crypto related chat rooms on its platforms. These platforms, known as Post Bar services include the two main crypto chat rooms, Digital Currency Bar and Virtual Currency Bar. The search page displays the message that the two rooms have been temporarily closed as per the law.

Baidu is also planning to either restrict or ban on cryptocurrency related topics on the company’s online forum Baidu Tieba. Interestingly enough, other forums that are associated with keywords such as “bitcoin” or “Ethereum” were still active when this news broke.

A spokesperson for Baidu Tieba said that the two forums that had been closed were probably linked to ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) and/or cryptocurrency speculation.

The spokesperson justified these closures by comparing it to what WeChat had already done. The social media platform had just last week banned all posts related to cryptocurrency trading as well as ICOs.

Top Tech Companies Banning Crypto Activities

The Chinese government’s stance on cryptocurrencies – specifically Initial Coin Offerings and cryptocurrency speculation – has only become tougher. And the technology giants are scrambling to ensure that they are complaint with the new laws.

Both Tencent and Alibaba have already announced their plans to crackdown on any transactions on their mobile payment services platforms that may be even remotely related to cryptocurrency.

Tencent issued a statement that it was banning all cryptocurrency trading on its mobile social networking app WeChat. Measures that the company was going to take included monitoring real-time daily transactions as well as blocking any transactions that were deemed suspicious.

Alibaba has also announced similar plans. The company’s Ant Financial subsidiary announced that was going to restrict or even ban all accounts on its online payments platform – Alipay – if they were found to be related to cryptocurrency trading in any way.

Neither Alibaba nor Tencent clarified how their users’ accounts would be monitored.

China’s Crackdown Intensifies

The Chinese government began its crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry in September 2017. Domestic exchanges and ICOs were banned from the country, prompting Chinese crypto exchange operators and ICO projects to migrate outside the country.

The challenge that the Chinese government has been facing is that operators and ICOs still continue to attract Chinese customers via networking platforms such as WeChat as well as Telegram.

Thus, the government is now intensifying its crackdown on the crypto world by shutting down multiple crypto related news accounts on WeChat. The government has even gone so far as to mandate that hotels, offices and shopping malls can no longer host crypto-related events.

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