The change follows only a few days after the head of the Cyberspace Administration of China stepped down.

The new directive instructs websites to “set up internal monitoring mechanism”, and that it is “forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts”.

Websites were specifically instructed to publish only factually accurate information: “No website is allowed to report public news without specifying the sources, or report news that quotes untrue origins.”

Endgadget notes that although the agency’s notice doesn’t seem particularly aggressive, there is a threatening undertone in saying that the Cyberspace Administration would publish offending publications.

How websites would be published is not clear however, and Ars Technical points out that that how strictly the new rules will be enforced remains to be seen.