Chinese government bans all South Park content in response to "Band in China" episode

The Hollywood Reporter

Chinese officials have deleted all clips, episodes and online discussions of South Park after last week's episode went after American companies Google, Disney and the NBA, accusing them of sacrificing their morality for Chinese dollars. "A cursory perusal through China's highly regulated Internet landscape shows the show conspicuously absent everywhere it recently had a presence," reports The Hollywood Reporter's Patrick Brzeski. "A search of the Twitter-like social media service Weibo turns up not a single mention of South Park among the billions of past posts. On streaming service Youku, owned by Internet giant Alibaba, all links to clips, episodes and even full seasons of the show are now dead. And on Baidu's Tieba, China's largest online discussions platform, the threads and sub-threads related to South Park are nonfunctional. If users manually type in the URL for what was formerly the South Park thread, a message appears saying that, 'According to the relevant law and regulation, this section is temporarily not open.'" The move comes as the NBA is embroiled in a controversy over Houston Rockets general manager Bryan Morey tweeting his support for Hong Kong protesters.

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