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."

Comments

On the third try...

[chrismcdirty]

It acts like it will respond, but in reality it is notifying police that people are trying get information.

Re:On the third try...

[john83]

But would that not imply that the other search engines are getting around the firewall?

If the firewall is so effective, why would China have asked Google to impliment a search filter that's inferior to existing methods?

Olympics

[TrappedByMyself]

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.

Re:Olympics

[Zarel]

Considering the number of Westerners that actually want to search for things like "freedom" and "democracy" (as opposed to, say, "porn"), I'd say very few will notice.

Re:Olympics

[voice_of_all_reason]

It will be very interesting to see what happens during the 2008 Olympics when a ton of Westerners are getting their internet gimped

Who else will be there, really, except reporters and the athletes? I don't anticipate the Jones family in Oaklahoma getting a cornsitter for the farm and heading off to Beijing to see how the East makes flapjacks.

Reporters likely know to tread lightly already, and I'm sure the athletes have to go to some workshop before the whole thing starts titled "Don't do any of these things in country X or you will be killed."

Wow

[42Penguins]

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.

6-4

[BigNumber]

That's odd... at google.cn 6-4 says 6-4=2.

I can't find a flaw in that.

Censoring?

[Anonymous Coward]

"[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."

Actually, I think that's just how Yahoo! works in general.

Look behind the headlines

[b0wl0fud0n]

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.

Re:Look behind the headlines

[Pink Tinkletini]

There are those in Europe who believe America's habit of capital punishment is morally wrong, and a grave humanitarian injustice (and I'd be inclined to agree). But suppose you testified in a capital case, and your testimony helped send the defendant to the gurney. Next time you fly into Heathrow, do you think you should you be pulled aside, shackled, and tried in the Queen's court of law? Or would you appeal to the fact that what Europe considers morally wrong isn't the same as what America considers morally wrong?

Blocking Is Easy

[blueZhift]

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...

how long will it be before they tire of this game?

[cheesegunner]

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.

So much for freedom on the Internet

[abstract1]

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?

Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship

[TibbonZero]

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.

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[B1ackDragon]

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?

Re:'Worst' Filtering policy

[voice_of_all_reason]

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.

Re:Wow

[ndansmith]

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.

Would this work?

[Astatine210]

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.

Law, but not legitimate law.

[Kadin2048]

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.