Alibaba’s UC Browser was pulled from app stores in China as President Xi Jinping warned that Beijing’s tech crackdown was only going to intensify, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Tuesday (March 16).
The move was triggered by a television program segment that criticized the popular and widely-used UC Browser. The show, which was about deceptive medical ads, was televised by the state-owned broadcaster CCTV. The segment accused the browser of allowing “private hospitals to bid for the names of China’s large, well-known hospitals in keyword searches, leading potential patients to their websites instead of the public hospitals they intended to visit,” FT reported.
“We attach high importance to problems shown in the show, and quickly conducted a series of measures to check and correct,” a spokesperson from Alibaba’s UC Browser team told CNBC. The spokesperson added that the “illegal ad contents” that were referred to in the CCTV show had been removed immediately. “We will further enhance content review and shoulder more responsibility, and provide good info services with stricter standards,” the spokesperson added.
The decision to pull the browser from app stores follows a Communist Party leadership meeting on Monday (March 15), where Xi indicated that he wanted regulators to step up investigations into tech firms and find potential antitrust violations. He also said he wanted to reel in FinTechs and improve data security. “Some platform companies’ development is not standard and risks exist,” Xi said, per CNBC, citing CCTV.
Alibaba was told on Monday (March 15) that it has to spin off some of its media assets. Chinese officials were reportedly stunned by the number of Alibaba’s media holdings, which could give the company sway over public opinion.
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