Three prominent social media platforms in China are getting investigated by Chinese authorities to see if they have violated the nation's new cybersecurity law , enacted on June 1. In an online announcement , the country's cyber regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), said it will be looking for violations of rules on terror, rumors and pornography on the three sites identified as WeChat, Weibo and Baidu Tieba.

Lennon Chang, a lecturer in criminology at Monash University in Australia, said the investigation “is likely to be a signal from the government to let the public know that they are taking this [cybersecurity] law seriously.

The move also led to concern among privacy advocates of the Chinese government's “tightening control over the internet, ” Maya Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Legaltech News.