China's Parallel Online Universe 173
An anonymous reader writes "China is increasingly operating an online parallel universe where social media clones 'mimic the functions of the most popular, internationally recognized social media applications, such as Facebook and Twitter. The replicas, however, come with a major catch: they systematically comply with the Chinese Communist Party’s strict censorship requirements.' They are satisfying the growing demand of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens for social media tools, reducing incentives for them to circumvent the 'Great Firewall,' Freedom House warns. Testing by researchers found that a search for the names of seven prominent Chinese lawyers, activists, and journalists on Sina Weibo returned no results, only an Orwellian notice that 'According to related laws and policy, some of the results are not shown here.'"
Re:But it's not wrong when corporations do it! Rig (Score:3, Informative)
In America, censorship is only bad if the gubbmint is doing it.
Right. Because it only is censorship when the government is doing it. That's what the first amendment is all about: limiting the government's ability to mess with people's expression. That same constitution is also very serious about freedom to assemble and carry on doing your own thing ... including doing things like running a business where you can say what goes on in your own publications. Google being able to limit what shows on their web site is freedom, and it's a good thing, too.
Re:And How Is It Better Outside of China? (Score:2, Informative)
Go to China. Type in www.facebook.com. See what happens.
(To those who don't wanna travel: the government is blocking it, thus you can't open it).
Google is just made very slow (unless you use a VPN connection, then it's magically fast again...) and services like youtube and so on are blocked too.
You can't compare censorship in China to that in any other major nation, not even Iran. They really control every detail. They even made skype add some plugin to send all data to the government (called TOMSkype), you can't download normal skype in China.
Anyway, it's also unfair to compare China and the US. The education level in China is even way lower than that in the US and people are really much less developed. China is a third world country, not a wealthy first world nation - they need a strong government to keep the country stable until it reached a certain education level and is ready for democracy. And every Chinese person who is smart enough to understand politics is also smart enough to "clime the Great Firewall", thus bypass it and have free internet.
And China can even be freer than the US if u're smart - as the guys who should enforce the law are usually not that smart which means they can't catch you if you are sophisticated enough. And if they catch you, you just bribe them, like everyone does in China^^
Re:Comment Censored (Score:5, Informative)
This. Mod parent up.
Corporations can and do abuse the legal system to censor free speech, but it is not strictly censorship as it is not the policy of the government, and if it is a found to be a SLAPP there are severe penalties in a lot of courts.
"Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. It's not just the government, anyone who has control over the means of communication can be a censor.
Re:But it's not wrong when corporations do it! Rig (Score:5, Informative)
Hi from Beijing.
Generally, it's only big fish who get the lock-up treatment. If you say something anti-government most of the time you'll just get filtered out by an automated keyword block system and noone will care. It's only when you get to be in a position where a lot of people might pay attention to you that you'd attract "personal" treatment.
As an example, during the Egypt riots last year, a few of my friends were sending Weibo tweets drawing parallels between pictures of tanks in Cairo and events in/around Tian'anmen Square in 1989. None of them received visits from the authorities & their posts were either quietly keyword-blocked or deleted soon after they were posted.
For a counter example, look up Ai Weiwei. The main difference is that he's famous and he's been openly and actively anti-government for quite some time.
Ai Weiwei was a big fish. Me and my friends are little fish and are fairly unlikely to be disturbed & can continue to be openly critical as long as we don't get too much attention.