Major internet services in China including Baidu, Weibo, Zhihu, and Sogo appear to have started censoring keywords associated with crypto exchanges catering to Chinese traders and investors.
The censorship of keywords associated with Binance, Huobi, and OKEx by the popular internet services comes after government officials in mainland China recently started putting pressure on crypto mining and trading.
At press time, searching either the Chinese or English names of Binance, Huobi, and OKEx on Google-like Baidu, Sogo, Quora-like Zhihu, or Twitter-like Weibo shows zero search results, as verified by CoinDesk.
On Weibo, for example, its mobile app says “according to the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results have not been displayed,” when CoinDesk attempted to search Binance, Huobi and OKEx both in English and Chinese.
However, Weibo accounts for crypto Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in China were still active at the time of writing, including Jay Hao, OKEx’s CEO and Justin Sun, the founder of Tron.
As CoinDesk reported previously, Weibo also blocked a large number of crypto KOLs in China in June 5.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have continued to face price pressure due to rising concerns from investors and traders outside and inside China about the regulatory regime for crypto in the East Asian country.