Dem$%#@!&
I edited two stories today that I was going to post here. One was the Live 8 text fund-raising that we talked about in class tonight, but I'm pretty sure no one's posted the other one yet.
On May 26, MSN launched the My Spaces portal in China; since then, more than 5 million people have registered their blogs. China's a pretty exciting place politically and technologically right now; the latest tech toys our political circles discover are often old news across the sea.
But with the launch of My Spaces, the Chinese government--with the consent and cooperation of Microsoft--is censoring the messages being posted through the portal. Along with profanity and sexual language, a few other choice words are sure to get your message flagged and force the sender to rewrite her message: "Democracy," "freedom," and "human rights."
We keep talking about the doors technology can open for politics, but it's also worth nothing that under the wrong circumstances, technology can be used to close doors, too.
Though it's also important to see that the Chinese government fell into the same trap our president did when he tried to keep his name from falling into the wrong hands on the Web--changing the subject line of a sentence or a character here or there seems to let messages go through in China.
On May 26, MSN launched the My Spaces portal in China; since then, more than 5 million people have registered their blogs. China's a pretty exciting place politically and technologically right now; the latest tech toys our political circles discover are often old news across the sea.
But with the launch of My Spaces, the Chinese government--with the consent and cooperation of Microsoft--is censoring the messages being posted through the portal. Along with profanity and sexual language, a few other choice words are sure to get your message flagged and force the sender to rewrite her message: "Democracy," "freedom," and "human rights."
We keep talking about the doors technology can open for politics, but it's also worth nothing that under the wrong circumstances, technology can be used to close doors, too.
Though it's also important to see that the Chinese government fell into the same trap our president did when he tried to keep his name from falling into the wrong hands on the Web--changing the subject line of a sentence or a character here or there seems to let messages go through in China.
posted by politiae at 9:41 PM
2 Comments:
I think it will be interesting to see if there will be any formal US response to this.
With all our talk of spreading Democracy, let's see how we deal with this!
With all the rights violations that happen on a daily basis in China (and with the U.S. needing China to convince North Korea to come back to the nuke talks), I doubt we'll hear much of a peep from our government. Unless, of course, we decide to go insane and start a war with China (by "we" I mean 24's Jack Bauer), in which case we'll dig up that file of "Bad stuff China did."
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