The article itself mentioned a date, Oct 8, 2017, when the "new" regulation come into effect. So yes, this is old news.
Reading the article in Chinese, I do understand that the main focus of the new article is cracking down illegal activities like distributing pornography (which is illegal in China), gambling, scamming, etc, which are problems on the social networks that are quite important to solve.
I didn't see anywhere in the Chinese article that mentioned "politically sensitive information", "bring news about Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan that has not been reported by official news channels", publish “military information.” The sentence "spread rumors" is mentioned in combination with "scamming" and should be focusing on "scamming" part.
But again, there's nothing surprising that western media interpret this in a completely different way. That's just one thing they all love to do.