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Chinese Ban Internet Rumors
dptalia writes "Chongqing province in southwest China has just passed a law fining people who post malicious rumors online. An individual can face fines of 1,000 to 5,000 yuan ($630) and an organization can be fined between 3,000 and 15,000 yuan."
...how do you do decide what is (or isn't) a malicious rumor? I'm sure the Chinese government knows very well.
They would be branded at evil dictators for telling their citizens what to do,say,see and read. Maybe someone should sprinkle the magic democracy fairy dust in their eyes. -1 flamebait. :(
A good friend of mine who use to be a journalist in China talked about a few months about how the freedom of speech isn't as abridged as we'd like to think of it in the west. He had mentioned the biggest part was that you can't talk about people from a perspective that can ruin their reputation because it is a big part of their culture (as it is in many parts of Asia).
Most of the time, this rule is the one invoked when censoring something...talk bad about the gov't, you are implicitly impugning someone. Its horribly implemented with no safe guards (especially since employers can be fined and employees can be jailed), but I can see why the sentiment is good.
I've had my name slandered several times in the past over the internet. I don't know why the slashdot crowd gets up in arms when someone patents something by appending On The Internet, but if you state this in terms of other non-rights they get upset. I'm not stealing if I'm Stealing On The Internet. It isn't slander if I lie about someone and defame their family ON THE INTERNET.
Most of the time, if speech like I've had to endure were put up in a newspaper, my rivals would have lost a house over libel. If they would have done it at a public gathering, it would have been slander. (and if they merely mention it to a neighbor, well, thats an out and out lie that I can handle on my own). People don't see the value of reputation anymore in the west. People are too selfcentered and care nothing about anyone else -- until it happens to them (for my part, I've never said anything online or in public that wasn't backed up by non-ambigious documentation and even then, I've tried to talk to the other party personally before I have done so).
So I'm all for China stringing up anyone that ruins someone elses reputation through rumor. The US just passed the 300 Million mark this weekend. China has 1.5 Billion. Personally, I think we have enough idiots on this planet and wouldn't shed a tear about the few that want to throw unsubstantiated lies about others online. Have solid backing evidence...I'm all for it...Publish what you got. Pure out and out rumor...you need to leave.
Bush suspends Habeas corpus. Coming to your area: gulag!
They said malicious rumours. Guess who gets to decide what's malicious?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
That's kind of the point in a dictatorship. You create a ridiculous number of laws, so many that every citizen is at any given point probably breaking 2 or 3 of them. Then you selectively enforce the laws against citizens who have fallen from favor in the eyes of the government. Naturally you also want to randomly enforce them against random citizens as well so you can keep up a low-grade environment of anxiety. That keeps most of them in line, too worried about breaking some law they've never heard of to stir up any serious dissent.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, the part about China being a tyranical Communist dictatorship.
China, yep, still a communist dictatorship. This is news for geeks in the same sense that "Today, Microsoft and Bank of America made a lot of money, and many dragons were slain in WoW... ON THE INTERNET" is.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I no longer expect the news that I read to be accurate in any way, nor do I expect that people who give me the news to care that they are not accurate.
That's not just China, buddy. That's a pretty prevailant thing worldwide these days. If not necessarily false all the time, just useless sensationalism or heavily partisian.
People here (in the US) aren't skeptical enough.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers