Chinese Portals Pledge More Self-Policing

An anonymous reader writes "A slew of Chinese web portals have pledged to self-police even more, after signing on to a Beijing plan to 'clean up the internet'. Google and MSN have not joined the group." From the article: "The firms' pledge states that the Internet has become an important source of information and entertainment in China, now the world's second-biggest market with more than 100 million Web surfers. 'At the same time as the Web develops quickly, certain sites are transmitting unhealthy news ... and uncivilized voice services, including pornographic content that can be harmful to society,' said the pledge, which was dated earlier this month in a posting on Sina's Web site."

Comments

Hollywood and the US comics industry

[Frantactical Fruke]

Sounds remarkably like what Hollywood did in the 1930s or so and what American comics publishers did in the 1950s in the form of the Comics Code: In order to avoid being censored by government legislation, they decided to censor themselves.

Movies abided by rules such as: No prolonged kissing - never show even a married couple in the same bed - no revenge plots (the hero just happened to kill his enemies in self defence while pursuing nobler goals) etc. ad nauseam. The excision of politics was just an unwritten rule, but followed particularly religiously until the 60s.

The Comics Code was even more rigorous. It killed comics as a form of entertainment for adults up until the 1990s. Horror comics, erotic comics, realistic violence etc. ceased to exist. Nothing but spandex pap was left in its wake. And if you say now that you're a grown-up who reads Marvel comics, tell me: Just how grown-up do you feel while you're doing it? I feel about 12 years old when I dive into X-Men.

self-policing

[tigris]

The New York Times put up an interesting article this past Sunday about Google and China which discussed the self-policing mechanism:

American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the government to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they must censor. They quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead, the government simply insists the firms interpret the vague regulations themselves. The companies must do a sort of political mind reading and intuit in advance what the government won't like. ... As a result, Internet executives in China most likely censor far more material than they need to. The Chinese system relies on a classic psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive than formal censorship. By having each private company assume responsibility for its corner of the Internet, the government effectively outsources the otherwise unmanageable task of monitoring the billions of e-mail messages, news stories and chat postings that circulate every day in China. The government's preferred method seems to be to leave the companies guessing, then to call up occasionally with angry demands that a Web page be taken down in 24 hours. "It's the panopticon," says James Mulvenon, a China specialist who is the head of a Washington policy group called the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. "There's a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they're looking at everything."

Re:Enough criticism!

[deadweight]

The idea that the individual is insignificant? The idea that order and obedience are the most important virtues? The idea that forced abortions are OK? The idea that slave labor is OK? I can't wait :(