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Yahoo China has the Worst Filtering Policy
rmunaval writes "Reporters Without Borders has an article on search-result censorship in China by different companies. The conclusion was made based on six politically sensitive keywords. A search on yahoo.cn resulted in 97% pro-Beijing results compared to 83% on google.cn and 78% on msn.cn." From the article: "[Yahoo!] is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or 'Tibet independence', temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond."
It acts like it will respond, but in reality it is notifying police that people are trying get information.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped. I wonder if China will have free internet zones to avoid bad press.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Every once in a while I think censorship has gotten bad here in the USA.
Try searching "Tiananmen Square" on yahoo.cn and compare to yahoo.com.
If I had more bandwidth, I'd gladly put up a proxy for these folks.
That's odd... at google.cn 6-4 says 6-4=2.
I can't find a flaw in that.
ZIM: Well, after I was done with my rampage I put the fires out.
TALLEST: You made them worse!
ZIM: Worse... or better?
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
According to the article, it seems like it's the best, with the least number of "unauthorized" results. One has to wonder how they decide what is "unauthorized" and what is "authorized", though. Do they call the government and ask "Hey, will you tell me if I should look at $PRODEMOCRACY_WEBSITE?"
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
Yahoo may not intentionally be setting a strict policy towards censorship. You have to consider how the Chinese state is run. The Communist Party is an exclusive group of members who actively recruit in order to increase their influence over the population.
During China's rapid economic growth as a result of foreign investment and a move towards a free market economy, the Communist Party was unable to cope with the rapidly changing environment and failed to make the transition into this environment and continued to recruit amongst traditional areas of the Chinese economy.
Thus this created serious problems since Communist Party penetration in privately owned companies to less than one percent. This generated tremendous amounts of fear within the organization since they realized that they were falling behind on the times and needed to aggressively recruit from the educated portions of the population.
Without new recruits within the new economy, the hold of the Communist Party on the population would be significantly weakened. A significant problem since the Communist Party's right to rule is derived from mostly propaganda and peer pressure. Few people feel like protesting the government because Chinese culture derives it's strength through strength by numbers. Belonging to a group is especially important to Chinese people and by going against the government, you suffer severe consequences socially, economically, etc.... You can easily see how the lack of Communist Party members within the richest and most profitable portions of the workforce could become a problem.
One of the reasons why Communist Party membership penetration amongst the workforce was so low in privately owned businesses was because of a lack of recruitment amongst the intellectuals in the country. The educated group has always been shunned by the Communist Party throughout it's existence (ie Cultural Revolution/Tianamen/Hundred Flowers Campaign). However, when Communist Party members began to leave their posts to work for private corporations, the party was forced to change and the Communist Party began significantly recruiting from intellectuals. Since this movement started, Communist Party penetration has now grown to the 5-6% range within privately owned companies (although many neglect their duties and fail to pay their dues).
My bet is that the Communist Party specifically targeted Yahoo when they were recruiting for new Communist Party members in order to create an internal system to maintain control and ensure that Yahoo, as a foreign privately owned company, wouldn't go too far out of line of Communist Party doctrine. There isn't much that Yahoo can do as a foreign company can do to change the internal culture of their Chinese employee workforce. You can't fight against the Chinese government.
Well, Yahoo! (and the others) are just following the money. And of course cutting stuff out of returned search results is probably not very hard to do, if you really don't care about unintentionally blocking other stuff. We can all be pretty sure that the saavy Chinese internet user knows that the results they get back are censored. It's too bad that U.S. based companies have to be such willing participants. But hey, they're just in it for the money like any for profit corporation. Just stating the obvious...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Don't worry about setting up a proxy for the Chinese, most of them already know how to get around the system.
They can't possibly win this one... sure, "tibet independence" is blocked, but if you search "free tibet" on google.cn, you get nothing but pro-tibetan pages. It may take a while, but I think they'll eventually realize that, just or unjust be damned, it's just plain uneconomical to try to keep up with blocking search terms.
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.
--Mark Twain
I wonder when this will all stop...or better yet, what it is all leading up to? A different Internet for each country? A governing body consisting of members from various nations (yea right)? When is enough enough when it comes to freedom on the Internet? I mean, if they aren't even allowed to SEARCH, where will the next limitation be placed? It's only a matter of time before the masses revolt against such restrictions. But then again, (so to speak) - if they haven't seen the grass on the other side how do they know it is greener? Generations are growing up in these censored countries and don't even realize it is happening. Not only are they missing out on a lot of information on the internet, but their entire culture is being CHANGED based on what the government wants them to see and believe. Thoughts?
Firstly, I can't stand how any of these companies is just 'going along' with it. Yes, fiduciary responsiblity to investors etc but so would be dealing with the devil.
To the point however, it's funny that all of this happens only due to the world's largest communist country accepting certain capitalist ideas. What i'm saying, is that if it wasn't due to the money factor then this wouldn't be happening, and the search engines of the world might (effectively even perhaps) force China to change some of their policies a bit. However, since money IS the issue (which for some reason in reading Marx/Engles I thought that money wasn't supposed to be controlling in Communisim) then the people are being censored.
Were I a company, I'd just say "Fuck you" to China.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
From the article:
This seems like a rather simplistic analysis to me. Are most Chinese citizens going to use such obvious terms to search for information about topics they know the government is attempting to block? My understanding of how Chinese citizens use the Internet is limited, so I'm likely off base. It just seems to me that most Chinese users of Yahoo would be gathering information using terms less likely to be aggressively filtered. A broader comparison might be more useful in determining just how aggressively each engine is filtering results.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I don't know if the ATHF reference is really applicable, unless yahoo is peeling skin off of chinese people to record search results.
Yeah, as much as I'm tempted to say that Yahoo is 16% more evil than Google, I think it's more likely that they are equally evil - Yahoo is just more competent at it.
Unless of course, Google's poor censorship is on purpose, and it's their way of bringing freedom to the area. Then um, way to go?
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Weird... I can actually get refrences to the massacre using Yahoo China by searching Tianenmen Square massacre.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
I think you'll be hardpressed to find a Chinamen that gives a damn (and that wouldn't turn you in for doing so).
It should also be noted that our results here in the US are also censored.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
One has to wonder how they decide what is "unauthorized" and what is "authorized", though
The government in China deliberately doesn't specify exactly what is illegal. It's far more effective for ISPs, newspapers, tv producers to overcompensate in censoring themselves knowing that failing to do so will likely lead to their imprisonment or execution.
This could be an issue of cultural bias, not censorship. In the English speaking west, the only thing we know about Tiananmen Square is that major pro-democracy protests occured there in 1989. To Chinese people it has a much broader significance, and the protests are only one of many notable aspects of the Square (including the fact that it is the largest public square in the world).
Perhaps a Chinese person could come to the conclusion that the US government is censoring information about the civil rights movement, because when "Lincoln Memorial" is typed into google.com, there is no mention of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in the top results.
I would like to propose an addendum to Godwin's law, whereby all references to Tiananmen Square with respect to search engines immediately ends the thread, and whoever mentioned Tiananmen Square automatically loses any debate in progress.
Mod parent up. This is closer to what's actually happening--the 1989 massacre shows up in Google image results once you get past the first page or two. You'd be hard-pressed to find any Chinese citizen who doesn't know about the 1989 events and wouldn't know where to find information on it.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Sure the returns are different, but top link on yahoo.cn for ["Tiananmen Square" massacre] is enough information to start someone thinking.
So I'm a little doubtful that these changes are dramatically affecting the mindset of the Chinese population. Like I've heard in interviews before "If you want to read it, you can find it".
If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond.
I wonder if it is better to let your customers search for things that will get them persecuted? If there is simply an error then Yahoo could probably get away with simply not logging the attempted search. So eventually when they are compelled to hand over search logs to the police then they can claim that it was simply an error and perhaps not log the attempt in any detail. And, except that it is now documented, it is so subtle that police would be none the wiser.
Then again this is precisely the type of thing authoritarian governments count on, that merely the threat of persecution is enough to suppress most challenges to their authority. Leaving the few real challenges to their authority to be dealt with harshly. Authoritarian and totalitarian governments really turn morality on its head and being honest about even the littlest thing might get yourself or someone else hurt or killed.
I am not a statistician, but that seems like kind of a small sample set for such a sweeping statement. Each search engine was judged based on just 60 reported websites (6 terms, 10 results apiece). I'd be interested to see what one would find on, say, the fifth page of results. The quality and relevance of the search returns on page five would decrease probably, but some oddball stuff can get through that way.
I do give them serious credit for even reporting the methodology - a lot of places that post stats (aside from tech reviewers) never post how they got those results, or under what conditions.
Yahoo actually has the best filtering, technically speaking. All these companies have decided to go along with Chinese government policy and filter antigovernment content. It just happens that Yahoo's filter works better.
The problem is when things that are illegal NOT to do in China are illegal to do in the US. Sure, we have a very selective policy on enforcing our laws on citizens working in other countries. As long as the Google regional president in China isn't availing himself of sex tourism, he should be in the clear.
Look at it this way -- what if Google opened an office in Amsterdam for Google Weed? Promoted it just as heavily as every other service and with the same zeal, and they wouldn't ship to the USA. Think there'd be so many lawmakers insisting they were "just following the local laws?"
You think the Chinese have it bad... I can only get to slashdot at work from 11:30 - 12:30! In the US even!
My sig can beat up your sig.
Actually, based on the reports I've read, the majority of Chinese internet users don't care. They search for information on freedom and democracy about as often as the average American, which is to say, not very often.
I would bet that if anything bothers the average Chinese internet user, it's probably the censorship of porn, not political speech.
There are methods available today by which most people with half a brain could circumvent the Chinese authorities and read Western information sources, write blogs, etc. But the great majority of Chinese internet users, just like their American and European counterparts, are probably more interested in searching for the latest information on pop stars and movies than they are in reading some dissident's blog.
Availibility of information is the easy part, compared with getting people interested in reading it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
fine then, please demonstrate how our results are censored. Oh wait, that's right, they aren't. You're talking about Chinese government censorship as the same thing as FOX or CNN putting pro-US slant on things. That doesn't mean I can't search for and find anyhting I want on the interent.
Another example is the results if you search for Nagasaki on google.com compared to google.co.jp
In Japan, people know of it as a city, while people outside of Japan generally only know of it as the second victim of the nuke.
Okay, I'm not sure it really matters. But yes, not the law per se, but one of the "corollaries and usages," as Wikipedia puts it:
"There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress."
So, however I should label it, that's what I want.
Have a good one.
Worst ? Best ?
:)
It's really the same once you're accounting for PR spin.
Yahoo is the worst filter as XP SP2 has the best firewall.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
In Google.com if i search for 6-4 it displays 6 - 4 = 2 What kind of censorhip is this?? XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (censored) .....
As a possible tactic to foil China's crippling of internet searching (or, for that matter, any country's policy of censoring its internet input), set up a number of "code word" euphemisms for events happening in China that match phrases that don't initially look suspicious to the authorities, and which will blend into the background of most searches until long after the proverbial cat is out of the bag.
For instance, set up a website that details the Tianenmen Square massacre of 1989; however, instead of plastering "Tianenmen Square Massacre" all over it, refer to it as the "Hunan Blossom Harvest". The language and pictures will make certain to anyone viewing the site that this is anything but horticultural; it's a depiction of a vicious crackdown on a peaceful public demonstration, with plenty of blatant "clues" to when and where it happened. Get plenty of friends to make websites referring to this event in the same manner.
All it takes is for one returning "dissident" armed with the phrase, and I'm fairly certain the news will spread meme-like far faster than the authorities can crack down on it.
Rinse and repeat with clear criticism of the Saudi royal family in slightly euphemistic Arabic, and other fun stuff.
Point of information...
If you put in "Lincoln Memorial" as the Google search, you get all manner of results (and as others pointed out, the Martin Luther King search result is a few pages in). But... if you phrase the search as "Lincoln Memorial" speech, the MLK speech is the top result. And the same is true of google.cn.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
What China government doing is far more than blocking.
There are several super computers doing real time analyzation of bits getting in and out of China on the Internet. Right, real time analyzation. So you can read the CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox as long as the super computer thinks the piece of information you are reading is OK. So people inside China feel almost nothing. And people out side of China feel nothing about it.
One thing should be mentioned is that there is Gigabits of data getting in and out of China per second. Guess who is behind those super computers. Intel, AMD, IBM or SUN?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
[Yahoo!] is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu.
That's would be like IBM packaging a can of Zyclon B with every punchcard machine sale to the Nazis
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
You had me right up until you used the phrase "legitimate laws." The laws in China are no more legitimate than the government which creates and promulgates them, which is to say, not at all. Since it does not derive its power from the consent of the governed, but instead through fear and intimidation (and lack of any alternatives whatsoever, even another party within the same political structure), it cannot claim any legitimacy.
To follow your line of reasoning would be to say that I.G. Farben did nothing wrong when it churned out Zyklon-B, because it was following a "legitimate law" of the government in power at the time. Following a law because you have no other choice, and a gun is being held to your head (figuratively or otherwise), is one thing; calling that sort of rule "legitimate" is quite another. (And don't start whining to me about Godwin's Law, this is a completely apt comparison in this situation. Both governments have roughly the same claim to legitimacy.)
I can excuse companies for falling in line with the Chinese regime because they have no choice but to do so, as long as they admit this is why they're doing it. (I will even accept, if not excuse, a company which stands up and says that they are cooperating with injustice because it is profitable to do so, and doesn't delude itself into thinking it's doing good.) Giving the government a claim to legitimacy is far more damaging, and in my mind inexcusable.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When i went to google.cn and searched "chinese food" it said.. "Did you mean food?"
God Be Gone
Ferengi Rule of Acquisition Number 33:
It never hurts to suck up to the boss.
Zim: I put the fires out!
Red Tallest: You made them worse!
Zim: Worse... or better?
The word you're looking for is "analysis".
That sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Probably the closest equivalent to Tiananmen Square in the U.S. would be Kent State, and when I type that into google I get refrences to the university but many more to the shootings. Searching "google images" for Kent State gives lots of pictures of the incident.
If you really think that anything going on today in the U.S. is comparable to Hundred Flowers, you should do a bit more reading. Or do whatever else is required to gain some perspective; there's a fundamental difference between discouraging someone from saying something because it's politically expedient, and dragging them off in the middle of the night and torturing them to death.
I admit, I've engaged in some karma-whore Bush-bashing from time to time as well. He's an easy target, and a lot of the stuff that's gone on recently is easy fodder for tinfoil-hat comparisons. But to seriously compare anything that's going on right now to the Chinese under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Russia under Stalin, or Germany under Hitler, is not only to show your own ignorance and lack of appreciation of scale and perspective, but also to do a disservice to those historical events, by comparing them to something that's quite frankly so trivial in relative impact and suffering.
If you wanted to compare what's going on today to the chilling effect during the 50's Red Scare, or something of similar scale internationally, then I would agree with you that such a comparison is probably apt, or at least closer to being apt than U.S. v. China/Germany/USSR/etc. comparisons are.
Drawing parallels between the U.S. today and actual fascist (whether leftist or rightist) regimes are nothing more than a cheap shot, and intellectually dishonest.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I went to yahoo.cn, which redirected me to cn.yahoo.com, and typed in "tibet independence" and it gave me a 7,690 hits. There were a lot of .cn domains and also some .orgs and .coms, but nothing seemed particularly "pro-Bejing." It certainly didn't block the site.
Meanwhile, a search on yahoo.com for the same term yielded 877,000 hits. I guess I don't understand how they qualified what's pro-Bejing or quantified their censorship rate, but I would tend to think my own query was affected by possible differences in their search algorithm based on language and my use of english characters on the chinese site more than by censorship.
Note that I'm not saying Yahoo isn't censoring searches, and perhaps they're treating IP's registered in the US different than Chinese addresses, but something about this study doesn't seem right.
They're basing this on six keywords?
Now if it was 600, or 6000, keywords I may actually believe it, at least a little.
Your comparison reminds me of an old joke we had here during the totalitarism:
An American and a Bulgarian are talking. The American says:
-Here, in the USA, we are really free. For example, I can go just in front of the White House, and shout: "Down with Ronald Reagan!", and nothing bad will happen to me.
-Oh, the same here: I can go just in front of the Party Central, and shout: "Down with Ronald Reagan!".
It is sad what has happened to the USA...
Does anyone know where we can find the pictures for $LATEST_ATROCITIES by $WESTERN_COUNTRY in $THIRDWORLD_COUNTRY? Or has that government still not released them in fear of outrage about them?
Sure, but imagine you're a prospective student in Akron, Ohio, trying to find relevant information about Kent State University--academics, programs, extracurriculars, that kind of thing. All you'll get from a naïve Google query is information about the shootings, which is irrelevant and useless to you, not to mention highly redundant (you grew up here, after all). I have no doubt a hypothetical www.google.akron.oh.us would rank the shootings far lower than would the nationwide www.google.com, and be that much more useful to you as an Akron resident.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
Alright, http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Int ellectual_Property/Copyrights/Digital_Millennium_C opyright_Act/Google_Erasure_of_Anti-Scientology_Li nks
Do a search for scientology. Right now it is 12.6 million vs 17.6 million. When I tried it a few months ago, it used to tell you...
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Does anyone know if you can "Yahoo" for UFOs in China?
How ahount UFOs on "Yahoo Video"? Are they blocked too?
Just wondering.
Why don't we maintain a list of filtered keywords and add them to every site we control or can find. Rather than makeing code words, let's flood the filters with noise. If they want to censor things, let them censor the whole web.
Find coupons in Greeley
Searching for "Tiananmen Square massacre" on yahoo.cn yielded about 2,000 results.
Searching for "Tiananmen Square massacre" on yahoo.com yielded about 185,000 results.
Yahoo's filtering isn't perfect, but it did remove 98.8% of the results, many of which were probably very critical of China. The Chinese Government isn't trying to erase history, but rather keep a pro-PRC or neutral spin on search results.
Sigs are for losers
You were saying?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Thank you, that's why we need the Firefox 2.0.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
You are an idiot. Or I have been trolled.
A) The so-called censored links your are referring to have long since been added back to the Google index.
B) The links to discussions of so-called censorship exist on the very site that you claim is performing the censorship!
C) The very first site on that list no longer exists. Truly a tribute to an issue that is still relevant today! I find this amazingly ironic, because Google is willing to link to, and keep a cached copy of, evidence of the very crime that you are accusing them of, long after the top-ranked site covering the issue has ceased to exist!
D) Scientologist have a written policy promoting the outright *destruction* of individuals and organizations that criticize or oppose them in any way. They have a track record of carrying out that policy to the letter without regard for laws, ethics, or morals (although they happily use the law if they can). I suspect that until Google was sure what it was dealing with and that it had a legal leg to stand on, they simply did not want to piss the Scientologists off. No one needs that shit at the office.
F) Maybe the number of search results is dwindling with time because more and more people realized that it is a smarter idea to simply ignore Scientology as opposed to baiting them into coming after you? Maybe just not as many people care about it one way or the other anymore?
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
Actually, that is not what is really happening. The offending pictures are being actively removed. The single image about the incident you see on page 3 was probably indexed by accident. You will also notice the page is no longer accessible.
C N and http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen&hl=zh- CN
The rest of the pages do not have one single picture of the massacre.
Two links worth two million words: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen&hl=zh-
That's not cultural bias. It's blatant censorship.
Try typing "Tibet" and "Independence". You'll come up with scads of *.cn sites all ranting about how the Dali Lama is "splittist". I wonder if they cover the vicious Chinese invasion of Tibet in there somewhere?
The US sure isn't perfect but China shows that it could be a lot worse.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I've been saying during this whole debate that it's better for Google (and the others) to be there, rather than not be there. Mainly because they will be providing the Chinese people with more and better information that they had before. And the fact that censorship can never be 100%. So this study is telling us that Google is providing 17% more "undesirable" content than if they were not there. OK, maybe that math is not correct (assuming Chinese censorship was 100% effective before, it'd be infinitely more content now). But the fact is that Google will allow SOME access to the content in question.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
That's "You made them worse, ZIM!"
Get it right! Honestly!
Also mod+1 grandparent who stole a comment/quote I was going to make/reference as soon as I saw the headline! Great minds, etc.
Yahoo just finds less results...
Maybe I need to RTFA, but this makes no sense. You have 6 words, you block one that means you let 83.33% through, block two you let 66.66%, and so on. How the hell do you get 97% and 78%? Unless you weight the words differently or it lets a partial through...
:/
Hey, its Friday, im tired of working
~nate
Well they definitely aren't being taught about it in school. And they aren't going to learn about it on TV, or the Net. If you're a parent, you probably don't want to talk to them about it either as kids tend to run their mouths all the time and could get themselves and you in a lot of trouble. So I'd say that the censorship has been pretty effective.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
These results are skewed... http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=I+don't+like+chin a&sm=Yahoo!+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&e i=UTF-8/
The few surviving samurai survey the battlefield. Count the arms the legs and heads and then divide by five.
Actually, the anti-Scientology site's the one being censored. With laws like the DMCA, the US is getting worse and worse.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I see artificial semantic analysis as a holy grail to censors, and as available computing power increases, I don't doubt that more resources will be devoted to utilizing it for a more "aware" parsing of monitored traffic.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
"Yahoo is just more competent at it."
Evil and incompetent? Google truly is the next Microsoft!
Censoring the search results is only the first level of defense. The filters at the service providers will catch a lot more, so many pages found can not be opened. The restrictions vary from province to province and are also depending on different branches of the different providers.
This is true, unfortunately. Even here in Beijing, where most young people have parents or relatives who were involved or knew people who were involved in the Tiananmen Square incident, it's not uncommon for them to not know what "6-4" means.
Of course, when you actually know something about the incident, it becomes very tiring listening to people parroting it in the west. What western power has not done something similar at some point or another? For example, in my parent's generation, the My Lai incident in Vietnam was a major, major deal, and yet most people in my generation probably have no idea what it is. Similarly, in my US World History class the 27 million soviet soldiers who gave their lives opposing Hitler were not even mentioned -- the only reason I even knew about them is because my German grandfather had first hand experience running from them, and yet somehow I was taught that the US and the UK did all the heavy lifting in the European theatre.
Other examples abound. Up until very recently, the Taiwanese government had an extremely active censor on the 228 incident, refering to a massacre that occurred on February 28th, 1947, in which the Guomindang essentially murdered between 10,000 and 30,000 people, depending on whose estimates you believe. The Tiananmen Square incident occurred much more recently -- in 1989 -- and the government already admits that it was "a mistake" (I live in China). The 228 incident was buried by the Taiwanese for more than 40 years (it is now a national holiday on Taiwan.)
The Japanese refuse, for reasons of face, to own up to the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst afronts to human decency the world has ever seen, and many Japanese I've spoken to have never heard of it, or if they have, are not aware of the implications. The Japanese government refuses to allow its inclusion in Japanese history books used for education, and the current Japanese PM makes frequent visits to the Yakusuni shrine, where he pays his respects to the convicted war criminals who were responsible for the Rape and many other similar atrocities.
There's the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British military gunned down 400 peaceful indian protestors, many of them women and children, who were sitting in a walled enclosure and had no means to escape the guns. At this point we're going back a ways in history, but how many British kids are fully aware of the implications of this incident?
It's also a little bit frustrating to hear the Tiananmen Square incident portrayed as a pro-democracy movement when that was really only part of it. It was, in fact, a relatively disorganized gathering of people with wildly different goals. Gorbachev was visting Beijing at the time, and for those of you that remember the timeframe this was around the time that he was pushing Perestroika in the USSR (judged by essentially everyone except some Americans to be a catastrophic failure in the long run.) The faction of students protesting the government were pushing for more transparency and more reforms, including but not limited to democratic and economic reforms. But they weren't the only ones there, nor were they the only ones murdered -- but because the other group (comprising roughly half of the people present) were not pro-democracy agitators, they are never mentioned in the west (their deaths, presumably, are not important.)
The other half were anti-reformists, primarily workers who had enjoyed good and stable conditions under pork barrell socialism and who were suffering under Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms, as they were unable to compete in an increasingly deregulated market place (similar to the anti-globalisation wonks we have nowadays.) They wanted a return to pre-1980s Maoist China! Can you believe it?
How could these two wildly seperate groups get along, given that they had such completely different aims (more reforms, versus less?) The answer is simply that they appealed to nationalistic fervor. They got together and sang the Inte
Were there any known executions for spreading or accessing anti-government propaganda in China in the last, say, 15 years (since Tiananmen)? If there is a suspicion that some or all of those at least are not publicised, then is there any evidence that they do happen, or is it pure speculation?
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
Well, now it's clear that we've got government TrollMods patrolling Slashdot. How pathetic and weak.
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make install -not war
They will notice. The BBC is blocked in China, and I imagine that many westerners will go there between their porn searches.
It's both. Google ranks websites based on (among other things) how many links are to them. It is not reasonable to suppose that websites which link to websites which the Chinese government doesn't like very often contain content that the Chinese government doesn't like, and thus the rebellious websites which stay around have a deflated number of links.
Search engines aren't the only things which China censors, after all.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Well, duh, what do you think "censorship" means? It is in the nature of censorship to conceal that it has happened. But, as a relatively poorly censored case of censorship, go to http://www.google.com/search?q=xenu and scroll to the bottom.
For an even more striking effect, do the same search on Google.cn and scroll to the bottom. Interesting, no?
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Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Huh? xenu.net is the anti-scientology site, and like I pointed out, Google happily returns 33,500 results for that query, and points to the complaint on the chillingeffects so you can even find the copyright-infringing materials. (And besides, this whole thing happened four years ago.) I may not be too thrilled about how the whole thing was handled, but pretending that it's even in the same ballpark as systematically supressing political views is just moronic.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Relax kid, no need for name calling. I was simply bringing up a situation where they have implemented a type of censorship here in the US. I had not realized until today that things have changed (I really don't go looking up Scientology too much). This still did happen. I'm sorry it got you so excited (very entertaining)
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
LOL! In China, it's 6-4. But I'm not even sure who you mean by "they" and "the rest of the world."