China banned TripAdvisor and 104 other applications

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China removed 105 applications from online stores. China explains this by pulling against content that has to do with pornography, prostitution, gambling and violence. Most of the banned apps are Chinese, but the US travel app TripAdvisor is among them. According to the Chinese Cyberspace Authority, all the applications in question violated one of the three cyber laws. According to the regulatory authority, they are the first of many applications awaiting a ban. The cleansing of the Chinese Internet began last month.

Chinese Internet users have lived for many years behind the called large Chinese firewall, as the system of censorship there is called. This prevents or severely restricts access to many foreign websites. For example, access to the US social network Facebook or Twitter is blocked in China. Washington and China have long been at odds with technology.

Since summer, for example, there has been a dispute between the administration of incumbent President Donald Trump and the Chinese company ByteDance over the TikTok short video sharing application. China is also famous for its harsh crackdown on Internet content, even though it is originated in China and enjoys great popularity. In 2018, Chinese regulators withdrew the online news aggregator Toutiao, which was ByteDance's biggest hit at the time, due to pornographic and vulgar content.

The next day, Beijing ordered ByteDance to permanently close the Neihan Duanzi social network due to vulgarity, whose users shared jokes, memes, and humorous videos. In the same year, China blocked the Marriott hotel chain's website and application for a week due to the company's designation of Hong Kong and Macao as separate countries on its platforms, contrary to Beijing's one-China policy.