媒体自由?

Just when I was lamenting the state of internet freedom in Singapore..

It’s an open secret that censorship of internet content not agreeable to Chinese authorities has been happening throughout the country for a while, but it seems that they are now blocking specific word searches on Google.

Blocked content apparently included - in English and Mandarin - 法轮功/Falun Gong and 西藏独立/Tibetan independence, but now even Google searches on words such as 民主/Democracy and 自由/Liberty return ‘unavailable’ sites.

A collaborative study by UToronto, Harvard and Cambridge has just been released 3 weeks ago: China is the world's leading censor of the Internet, filtering web sites, blogs, e-mail, and online forums for sensitive political content.

I didn’t read the study proper, for sure, but what I did see was enough to make me nauseous. There’s also a comprehensive list of the whole lot that is now effectively banned from the Chinese people. Be forewarned - it’s long.

The way the communications infrastructure has been set up is apparently extremely central and therefore extremely facilitative to content regulation (everything has to go through the 4 or 5 hubs nationally?). Still, there have been some holes in the blocking technology the authorities use, as well as activists overseas who help send proxy addresses and set up new ones to replace those that shut down.

Probably the most devious method the Chinese government has used, however, is to place the responsibility of (self)censorship on net service firms, and even users themselves. According to this article, more than 47, 000 internet cafes were shut down for not complying last year alone.

While I go froth, I leave you with the original news summary and a PDF version of aforementioned study.

TGIF - yay for more time to do yet more work on my (overdue) political theory essay on liberalism and democracy. The irony kills me.

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ps. This brings back recollections of a conversation I had with 魏京生 (Wei Jing Sheng), after his inspiring plenary speech at the IS|FiT conference in Norway earlier this year. I might write more on that at a later stage.


Technorati: internet freedom, internet regulation, technology, China