The Alibaba Group is facing requests from Chinese authorities to sell its media assets over growing concerns about the technological giant’s influence on public opinion in the country, a news report says.

Talks over the matter had been held since early this year after mainland Chinese regulators reviewed Alibaba’s portfolio of media assets, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, citing people with information.

The e-commerce giant, founded by billionaire Jack Ma, has stakes in a slate of media platforms encompassing print, digital publishing, broadcasting, social media and advertising. These include the Twitter-like Weibo microblog channel, several Chinese-language print and online publications, popular video-sharing website Bilibili and the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong acquired in 2016.

Chinese officials saw Alibaba’s media presence as posing a serious threat to China’s Communist Party and its propaganda, and asked the Hangzhou-based company to come up with a plan to substantially cut its holdings in the industry, the report said.

Alibaba declined to comment. It said in a statement that the company was a passive financial investor in media assets.

South China Morning Post chief executive Gary Liu sought to calm concerns about a possible transfer to a new owner. Liu said Alibaba’s commitment to the publication had not changed and it would continue to support the newspaper’s mission and businesses.

The asset-disposal talks come as the party is signaling moves to tighten its grip on internet companies, which hold massive amounts of valuable consumer and market data.

Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed during a recent meeting that the country should establish a sound mechanism to enhance supervision of web-related businesses, state-run China Central Television reported. Xi and other officials also said that Beijing was planning to step up efforts to rein in leading players and to strengthen data security in these enterprises.

Veteran China observer Johnny Lau said that only people trusted by the party were allowed to run media businesses in mainland China. The situation facing Ma’s business empire showed that he no longer had the trust of the party, Lau said.

The party also had a track record of cracking down on billionaires in the country, Lau said.

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