China's biggest microblogging site muted a number of social media accounts on the weekend after they tried to advertise on the back of interest in military drills in the Taiwan Strait.
Weibo removed more than 100 marketing posts under the hashtag "Eastern Theatre Command", the military region that covers six mainland provinces and the East China Sea, including the Taiwan Strait.
The command, part of the People's Liberation Army, started a series of drills in the waters on Saturday, becoming a trending topic on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
In a statement on Saturday, Weibo's administrative account said 104 posts had been deleted and five accounts muted for 15 to 30 days for violating community guidelines. Users of those accounts will not be able to post or comment during the period.
"During active inspections, the site found that a very small number of users were maliciously marketing and hyping up [their products] under the topic of 'Eastern Theatre Command' through 'homogenisation' means, undermining the ecological order of the network," Weibo said.
"Homogenisation" refers to a form of marketing similar to spamming, where content is posted repeatedly under unrelated trending topics.
The suspended accounts vary in nature but most of the posts are about celebrity gossip and commercial ads for items ranging from cosmetics products to electronics.
The Eastern Theatre Command hashtag appeared to be largely cleared of spam on Sunday.
"We call on all netizens to be vigilant, increase their mindfulness, and work with the site to maintain order on the network," Weibo said, adding that manual inspections of such spam content would increase.
Social media remains a major channel of dissemination of official news, and most of the posts under the hashtag "Eastern Theatre Command" are reposts of news about the drill from official outlets, with some adding their own comments supportive of the drills.
The topic had more than 16 million views on Weibo on Sunday, but its popularity has simmered down, with the newest attention-grabbers being celebrities and the coming return of Ya Ya, the giant panda that has been on loan to the Memphis Zoo for 20 years.
Beijing's manoeuvres around Taiwan came after its leader, Tsai Ing-wen, visited the United States, despite repeated warnings from Beijing that the trip should not go ahead.
During her 10-day trip, which wrapped on Friday, Tsai met House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the most senior US official to meet a Taiwanese president on American soil.
