I just received this e-mail bulletin from Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres), and am furious with U.S. corporations’ acquiesance to unreasonable government censorship. Will our blogs be next?
“Following Yahoo! … a second American Internet giant giving way to the Chinese authorities and agreeing to self-censorship.”
Al-Jazeera reports this morning:
Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corporation’s new China-based web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities – such as democracy, freedom and human rights.
“Prohibited language in text, please delete,” the message says.
Now, Google, which resisted censorship, looks likely to follow suit … obscenities and sexual references also are banned … more below:
More from the RSF bulletin:
“Does that mean that if the authorities asked Microsoft to provide information about Chinese cyberdissidents using its services that it would agree to do so, on the basis that it is “legal”? Reporters Without Borders wondered.
“We believe that this argument does not hold water and that these multinationals must respect certain basic ethical principles, in whatever country they are operating.”
Reporters Without Borders has been able to check that, as reported by several news agencies, when a Chinese blogger attempts to post a message containing terms such as “democracy”, “Dalai Lama”, “Falungong”, “4 June” (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), “China + corruption”, or “human rights”, a warning displays saying, “This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression.”
Generally “subversive” messages are displayed on Chinese-hosted forums and blogs but the banned words are automatically replaced with blank spaces.
The Chinese version of the MSN portal, along with the blog tool, were launched as a joint venture with a local state-controlled company, Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd (SAIL).
The Chinese authorities are trying to impose self-censorship on all search engines and blog tools that that wish to operate on its territory. Yahoo!, which was the first, agreed to remove all “subversive” news and information from its search results. Despite repeated requests from Reporters Without Borders, the company’s management always declined to discuss the issue.
Google, which has so far refused to censor its search engine, now looks likely to follow in the footsteps of its competitor. When the company announced it was opening an office in China, Reporters Without Borders wrote to its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them to respond clearly to the question: “Would you agree to censorship of your search engine if Beijing asked you to”. Google never replied.
Reporters Without Borders also wrote, on December 2003, to the CEO and founder of Microsoft, Steven A.Ballmer and Bill Gates, to bring to their attention their freedom of expression responsibilities, particularly in a country like China. This appeal, like the others, went unanswered.
More from Al-Jazeera’s article this morning:
Microsoft staff in China could not be reached immediately for comment.
However, a spokesman at the tech giant’s headquarters in Seattle acknowledged that the company was cooperating with the Chinese government to censor its Chinese-language web portal.
Microsoft and its Chinese business partner, government-funded Shanghai Alliance Investment, work with the authorities to omit forbidden words, said Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director for MSN.
But he added: “I don’t have access to the list at this point so I can’t really comment specifically on what’s there.”
Online tests found that apart from politically sensitive words, obscenities and sexual references also are banned.
[…….]
The Chinese government encourages internet use for business and education, but tries to ban access to material or websites deemed subversive.
A search on Google for such topics as Taiwan or Tibetan independence, the banned group Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama or the China Democracy Party inevitably leads to a “site cannot be found” message.
Consequences of defying government limits can be severe; 54 people have been jailed for posting essays or other content deemed subversive.
[…….]
Recently, the government demanded that website owners register with authorities by 30 June or face fines.
D’ocracy, Joon, Dolly Llama, Foulou-gone, Tchyna, hoo-man ryts.
If democracy is as popular as Viagra, no filters can stop it.
Yeah, but if they have to use a Chinese version of 733t, it’s going to be more difficult for the rest of us to know what they’re saying.
In anticipation of the spreading of Big Brother I think we should all brush up on our morris code.
Will the program also block emocracyday?
For more on Chinese bloggers please see my earlier diary on the censorship taking place. http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/6/9/182757/4605
Fine. How about fucktards?
My bet is that every corporation doing business in China will do the same or already has. Corporations are persons in the legal sense but not in the moral sense. That is what is fundamentally wrong with corporations.
how a great people, like the Chinese, are still putting up with this type of bullshit. I thought they would be unable to swallow Hong Kong, and Hong Kong would swallow them.
They need to demand their rights, democracy, freedom, and especially, human rights.
I wonder that about people in the U.S.
No, it’s not the same thing. But it ain’t all that different, either.
Manipulated information and emotions, inertia, fear, cultural conditioning, economic limitations, etc, etc …
No, no, no … you don’t want to go there.
But what is the reality on the ground? Seems to me the important thing is the threat of arrest, not attempts to mess with the tech. I have a feeling that the people in China who care about political discussion have already found ways around the filters. The old techie wisdom that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” may be less universal than we hoped, but nobody really controls the Net, and new tech will make such control even more difficult.
That said, MS’s craven “deleting for dollars” mentality is sickening. It’s just another example of the absolute amorality of the corporate plutocracy, and American hypocrisy. If MS were pulling a stunt like this in Iran or North Korea or another of the designated “axis”, helping the regime censor the opposition, all hell would break loose in the media and the administration. But we need China supporting the dollar, so barely a peep is heard.
The thing to remember is, if MS and its peers are willing to do this for money there, they’re just as willing to do it here. MS, at the moment, is just China’s Diebold.
Does someone have contact information for Microsoft, addresses, emails, fax numbers where (brief) letters of (polite, no obscenities) outrage will have the most impact?
Thousands and thousands and thousands of them.
Meanwhile in the USA ,
A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent.
Hal C.
Huh?
That’s about as stupid as the day I happened to catch a minute of Judge Judy who chewed out a guy who produced computer-printed copies of his receipts. Judge Judy skewered him for trying to pass off the receipts as authentic since, at the bottom of every page, there was the date … and the receipts were all made on the same day!
Last Sunday, a writer to Giordano noted that The government censors that used to keep narco-news on the other side of the “great wall” have relented and you can now get it on any server in China even without free downloadable software that any highschool student worth his salt has long since installed on his computer.
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Rebecca MacKinnon noted that the Internet police had a contradictory role in Chinese society.
the central Chinese government views the internet as a key weapon in its fight to assert control over provincial governments. Yes, in the era of economic reform the central government has been losing control over the provinces. And this loss of control is not always a good thing for ordinary citizens, especially because if a province happens to be governed by a bunch of bums […] Many local county governments evade environmental regulations and cover up the evasions, etc. Many collect illegal taxes. They hide information from the center about what they’re doing. The central government views e-government as its best hope of re-asserting control over provincial governments, because the internet will make it much harder for local officials to hide information.
Will Moss recounts his self-imposed restraint in his own blog.
Well, like many blogs, most of mine is either my own opinion or my opinion combined with information freely available on websites not blocked in China (since I can see them). I don’t usually re-publish stuff blocked in China, although there have been occasional exceptions, such as Reporters Sans Frontieres’ statement on Ching Cheong.
I don’t spend much time on arch-taboo subjects. I don’t generally talk about Tiananmen Square in the 1989 context both because that is a lightning-rod issue and because there are people much better able to comment on it than I am. I don’t talk about certain quasi-religious movements that China has banned (and, as you can see, I have not even mentioned them by name). Sometimes I wish I could, but that seems like a fast road to exile behind the Great Firewall.
Hal C.
Ooops, looks like my corporate doormat blocking software installed without a hitch…