BEIJING — What do these Chinese news reports have in common?

The decay of moral standards in northeast China villates. Arson on a bus in Changsha. A girl from Shanghai who fled from a Lunar New Year dinner at her boyfriend’s family home because of appalling living conditions.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, whose mission is to censor online information and block some websites (including that of The New York Times), has judged all those reports to be based on false information spread through social media platforms.

The reports were cited in an announcement as examples justifying a new regulation. The agency said it would punish websites that publish “directly as news reports unverified content found on online platforms such as social media.’’

“It is strictly forbidden for websites not to specify or to falsify news sources and to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts,’’ the Cyberspace Administration said.

The agency said it had already warned and punished nine websites, among them the popular news sites of Sina, Ifeng, Tencent, Caijing, and 163.

The announcement could be interpreted as a government mandate requiring Chinese news organizations and online publishers to adhere to stricter standards of journalism.

But scholars of the Chinese media say this is another attempt by the government of President Xi Jinping to tighten the vise around the practice of journalism and to restrict the flow of information online.

David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project website at the University of Hong Kong, said the agency’s demand — that “various websites adhere to correct guidance of public opinion’’ — clearly signals that published news must conform to political norms, rather than to any objective standard of the truth.

“It means political control of the media to ensure regime stability,’’ Bandurski said. “There is nothing at all ambiguous about the language, and it means we have to understand that ‘fake news’ will be stopped on political grounds, even if it is patently true and professionally verifiable.’’

Qiao Mu, associate professor of journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said that although the statement is directed at news websites, its ultimate aim is to try to silence ordinary people who post news on social media platforms such as WeChat or Weibo. This is how many Chinese learn of events around the country.

“The statement is more about intimidating every Internet user because they are hard to control,’’ he said.