Yahoo Agrees to Censor Chinese Portal

Bonker writes: "This article at Salon indicates that Yahoo, as part of a larger pledge to 'purge the Web of content that China's communist government deems subversive', has agreed to censor 'pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability' from its Chinese portal. Yahoo is one of about 300 other ISPs and websites who have signed the 'Public Pledge on Self-discipline for China Internet Industry'."

Comments

Re:Of course they should

[neocon]

And if they wanted to do business in South Africa twenty years ago, they would have had to purge sites claiming blacks should have the same rights as whites, and if they wanted to do business in Nazi Germany, they would have to purge all articles written by Jews.

Would you be okay with that, too? Or would you agree with me that there are some steps a business should not be willing to take?

And if they do agree to this, how does this affect their argument here in the US that they are not liable for customer content because they can't control it?

Self-censorship in the name of business

[Bonker]

Scarily enough, it goes on in the U.S. too. Take a good, long hard look at Walmart Corp. They are one of the nation's largest redistributors of magazines and other periodicals... so large, in fact, that if Walmart refuses to carry a magazine for a month, it can break a publication financially.

Combine that with the fact that Walmart has always upheld a rather fraudulent reputation that it is interested in the concerns of senior citezens, religious organizations, and 'family-oriented' concerns, and you end up with something pretty scary. Walmart has been known to refuse to sell books, games, CD's and magazines that had any kind of content deemed innapropriate. Quite a few of the magazines in the U.S. have to run their covers and editorial content past Walmart for approval before they can go to press.

Re:Self-censorship in the name of business

[isomeme]

While this situation sucks, it still doesn't approach the evil of government censorship. If Walmart drives your magazine out of business, you can still put your ideas out in other ways. If the government decides your ideas are illegal, then you have no recourse.

That being said, it sounds like this particular example looks (or is being made to look) more like self- than imposed censorship. I would say this move by China is similar to the coerced self-regulation of movies and comics in the US. The threat of legally codified censorship was used to pressure those industries into the standardized rating system and the "comics code" respectively. This is a gray area between purely capitalist "censorship" like the Walmart case and "say that and I will shoot you" style direct legal censorship.

If anything, I'd count this as a step up for Chinese government. They tend to go directly to the jackboots-and-guns stage rather than finessing issues like this, so using "voluntary" compliance here may be a good sign that things are beginning to loosen up over there.

Ah, Corporate Integrity...

[gdyas]

When companies like Yahoo! look across the Pacific at a large group of people fed bullshit & held under the thumb of an oppressive dictatorship and all they can think of is how they can buddy up to the gov't in order to get a crack at these "new consumers", I'd say that we have larger corporate ethics problems than Enron, kids.

Yahoo! Where your civil liberties are what your government tells us they are.

Re:Ah, Corporate Integrity...

[gdyas]

This is exactly my point. Yahoo should accept being banned from China's network instead of sanitizing its content as the Chinese government dictates. Yahoo should, indeed to keep its integrity must, pull its operation out of China if this is what's demanded of them. Participation in such an agreement inevitably puts the blood of Chinese political prisoners on the hands of Yahoo's board, and it's repellent.

There's a word for what you propose: appeasement. It's the acceptance of a dictate while maintaining the hope that they won't ask any more of you, that they'll be satisfied and you'll somehow be able to work under the new system. It failed to work in the late 30's, and it won't work in this analogous situation. No option? There's always an option, and the proper one here is to not collaborate with tyranny.

You're right though about our own government; it's composed of politicians who'd rather appease a large economic market than oppose oppression where it plainly exists, and I'm sure Yahoo takes some of its cues from them. None of that makes their behavior acceptable though.