China discourages sites from using social media to report the news

China's famously strict Internet rules regarding news websites took another odd turn this week: News sites cannot publish stories sourced from social media without official approval.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country's official agency tasked with governing Internet affairs, put the new rules in place.

"Online media basing news reports on contents made on social media must verify them before publication," reads the directive published on Xinhua, China's state-run new outlet.

In the report, several of China's top tier sites are mentioned as having previously run afoul of the agency, including sina.com, ifeng.com and 163.com. A separate report from the South China Morning Post indicates that Tencent's Qq.com and Caijing.com.cn have also been punished by the country's Internet agency for posting what it deemed to be "fabricated" news.

CAC recently saw the exit of its leader, Lu Wei, a high profile official who has met with a number of U.S. technology leaders, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The reason for Lu's departure hasn't been detailed, but the agency quickly moved to put Lu's former deputy director, Xu Lin, in place as the new head of the agency.

And while the new rules are likely to further curtail the distribution of information from China's social media sites, not much changes with regard to Chinese citizens getting info from U.S. social media sites, as sites including Facebook and Twitter remain blocked in the country.