Sexting Banned In China? Beijing Stiffens Penalties For Sharing “Obscene” Material

China is tightening its grip on digital content with a new rule banning the sharing of “obscene” material in private online messages, a move that could capture consensual adult exchanges like sexting and further blur the lines between public morality and personal privacy.

Effective January 1, the revised regulations also stiffen penalties for disseminating pornographic content, allowing authorities to impose 10- to 15-day detentions and fines of up to roughly $700 – up from a prior ceiling of about $420.

Washington Post reports:

While the revision will target the dissemination of pornography and exploitative images — which are also strictly regulated in countries including the United States — it may also mean that consensual sexting could also be dragged into China’s legal system. It will cover messages sent on WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese social media app, and will particularly target cases involving minors, state media reported Tuesday.

The announcement comes after a controversy this summer about explicit content circulating online. Chinese state media reported in July that a chat group on Telegram called “MaskPark” was distributing sexually explicit photos of women taken without their consent — with hidden cameras or in intimate settings. The exposé of the group, which reportedly had more than 100,000 members comprised mostly of Chinese men, prompted uproar online — with discussions focusing on deeply entrenched issues of sexism in Chinese society.

Rose Luqiu, a Chinese internet expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, described the changes to the Post as a “positive development” for shielding minors, though she noted the rules’ scope may prove “very broad” and open to “excessive interpretations” by enforcers. “This raises concerns about whether it could lead to public power intruding into individuals’ private lives,” Luqiu said.

The measures fit into a wider push to sanitize China’s internet landscape.

In September, the Cyberspace Administration of China kicked off a two-month sweep targeting posts that stir “violent or hostile sentiment,”"hostility and conflict,” or “world-weariness”—explicitly encompassing gloomy economic commentary, the BBC reported at the time. That effort carried into December, with Shanghai regulators deleting over 40,000 posts and sanctioning more than 70,000 real estate-linked accounts and livestreams for alleged doom-mongering in the struggling housing market, according to Reuters. Authorities cast these actions as vital for social stability and countering misinformation, even as analysts see them as part of an accelerating drive to mute frank debate on China’s economic slowdown and property woes.

Some experts argue that China’s ever-tightening restrictions on free speech represent a flawed strategy—one that amounts to wishful thinking by attempting to suppress discussion of the country’s deep-seated economic and social challenges rather than addressing them directly.

“If anything, contemporary Chinese history has repeatedly demonstrated that top-down ideological campaigns can hardly eradicate the social roots of problems,” Simon Sihang Luo, an assistant professor of social sciences at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told the BBC. “Even with a powerful government like the Chinese one, it is hard to arrest pessimist sentiments when the economy looks bleak, the job market is cruelly competitive, and birth rate hits rock bottom.”