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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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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...
It's a French group, so they're using Commonwealth English you dolt.
Were that I say, pancakes?
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
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
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