The 31-year-old, identified only by the pseudonym Zhang Qiang, was found guilty of breaking China’s antiterrorism laws after suggesting to his friends in a private WeChat group that they should “come join Isis with me”, using an abbreviation for the terrorist group. The incident happened on Sept 4 last year, after Zhang changed his profile picture to an image of the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The social media platform recently tightened its control over its users, making all group administrators criminally liable for messages posted in their chat rooms. An internet user from Beijing joked about reverting to more traditional forms of communication to avoid suffering the same fate as Zhang. In August, another Chinese person was sentenced to eight months in prison and fined 1,000 yuan for uploading a video to the internet that had terrorism-related content.

Source: New Strait Times September 25, 2017 02:37 UTC