xi's moments
Home | Opinion

Social media helps fight corruption best

By Zhang Zhouxiang | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2020-02-15 18:39

"I finally benefited from my father's power — as an official, he arranged a car to get me back to Jingzhou even though the whole province's roads are blocked."

On Friday afternoon, the micro blog user Euamoter made the above post on the platform. He might not have expected that, within hours, two hashtags - one with his account name #Euamoter# and the other #your father might lose his post# - had been put on the hot list of micro blog.

Perhaps out of anger for such an abuse of power, people found his accounts on other social media platforms and a race of finding his real identity emerged. There were also wild guesses about who his father was and several Jingzhou officials carrying the surname He suffered.

Things did not come to an end until 4:18 am on Saturday, when the troublemaker, who changed his ID to Needdu742, issued an apology letter online, explaining that that his father is only a low-ranking official of Jingzhou and the car that picked him up is one that carried materials; his father contacted it via a personal relationship of his friend.

At 5:31 am, the local police of Jingzhou reposted the apology letter, thanked the people for their attention, and advised the public to stop making wild guesses to avoid violating other innocent officials' rights of reputation. At 11:32 am, the information office of Jingzhou released via its official micro blog account that the father of Euamoter is a section-level official and the car traveled that way to buy materials. Now the father He Yanfang has already been suspended from his job and the local disciplinary watchdog is probing the case.

Whatever the conclusion of the probe is, the case is an excellent example of how transparency curbs corruption. In the social media epoch, everybody has access to microphones and any clues of possible corruption can be easily found and shared.

Under situations, social media and their users, who are of large numbers in size, are a good assistant to disciplinary watchdogs in their fight against corruption. They can watch for corruption 24 hours a day. When the anti-corruption agencies need clues or evidence, they can also rally for them via social media.

In some sense, each social media user is like a volunteer to the disciplinary watchdogs nationwide, and together they can help to root out corruption in every corner of the society and prevent more officials from falling victims to it.

The local police of Jingzhou thanked micro blog users, which best shows the authorities' attitude toward them, namely encouragement and cooperation.

Global Edition
BACK TO THE TOP
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349