January 5, 2006

Chinese Blogger Downed By MSN

The complicity of U.S. corporations in the suppression of free speech in Communist China continues. This time it's Microsoft doing the bidding of the Chinese government in order to turn a buck, by taking down the blog of one of China's most outspoken and controversial bloggers. Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN reporter in China, has the story at RConversation:

Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable....His old blog at the U.S.-hosted Blog-city is believed to have caused the Chinese authorities to block all Blog-city blogs. In the final days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some recent reporting on the recent police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China.

MacKinnon has been experimenting with the Chinese blogging system to try to determine who's blocking what...

...in mid-December I played around a bit with Chinese language blog-hosting tools to try and get a better idea of how they censor blogger content. I haven’t posted about it yet partially because family business and vacation got in the way, and partially because I wanted to do a few more tests. But given what happened to Anti I think I had better not wait.

Back over the summer I wrote a post titled Screenshots of Censorship about how MSN spaces was censoring the titles of its Chinese blogs, but not posts themselves. According to my testing in mid-late December, they now censoring much more intensely.

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like “Tibet Independence” or “Falun Gong” (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: “This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item.”

However I was successful in posting blog entries with non-controversial titles, but with politically sensitive words in the text body. For instance, a blog post titled “I love you” had “Tibet independence” in the text body, and a post titled “I am happy” had “Falun Gong” in the body...

...This was on Friday December 16th. By Monday the 19th, the whole blog had been taken down, just like Anti’s was on Dec.31st, with an error message: “This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible from the United States as well as from China. This means that the action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering and censoring the internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers.

See MacKinnon's follow-up post from today (which includes links to Microsoft officials defending their policies), and more on the Internet in China here. From that follow-up ...

In my view, this issue goes far beyond China. The behavior of companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! and others - and their eager willingness to comply with Chinese government demands - shows a fundamental lack of respect for users and our fundamental human rights. Globally.

Microsoft, Yahoo! and others are helping to institutionalize and legitimize the integration of censorship into the global IT business model.

Do not count on these companies to protect your human rights, if those rights are threatened by the over-stretching hand of any government anywhere on the planet.

Posted by dan at January 5, 2006 4:40 PM