Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a nonprofit advocating for press freedom, has urged Beijing to free journalists and political commentators and stop censoring information about the novel coronavirus outbreak in China.

RSF pointed out that two citizen journalists, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin, and two political commentators, Guo Quan and Xu Zhiyong, were arrested in early February in connection with their social media posts about the outbreak, in a statement published on Feb. 24.

“Censorship is clearly counter-productive in the fight against an epidemic and can only aggravate it or even help turn it into a pandemic,” said Cédric Alviani, the head of RSF’s East Asia bureau, in the statement.

“Only complete transparency will enable China to minimize the spread of false rumors and convince the population to follow the health and safety instructions recommended for curbing the epidemic.”

Guo, a human rights activist and a former assistant professor at Nanjing Normal University, was arrested on Jan. 31 after he posted about the coronavirus. He was then held at a detention center in Nanjing, the capital of eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, according to Radio Free Asia.