Chinese Official Vows to "Purify" the Net

Sleeping Kirby writes to tell us China's Communist party leader, Hu Jintao today announced the intent to leverage the economic potential of the web while seeking to "purify the internet environment". He proposes to do this by maintaining "the initiative in opinion" on the internet and to "'raise the level guidance on the internet," thus civilizing and purifying the internet environment.

Comments

Re:And this is unique to "Bolshevism" how?

[CRCulver]

Controlling the media to present a picture of fair and rational government has been the aim of almost every government/state/ruler in history and it continues to the present day.

Though, to be sure, one cannot assume that just because governments sometimes manipulate the press, any negative information about a government that eventually comes to light is true. During the reign of Justinian, he had Procopius produce a history of his times which was, of course, laden with remarks to sooth the emperor and avoid ascribing anything negative to the empire's administration. After his death, Procopius' Secret History appeared, purporting to give the "real story" of things, calling the general Belisarius an imcompetent fool and the Empress Theodora an outright whore. Yet, almost no historians believe anything in the secret history, which seems to be a kind of saucy genre of fiction that flourished at the time, and the reliable account is actually in the official production.

What I find at Slashdot is often groupthink that anything from the government is automatically wrong and any gossipy rumours that come from "underground sources" (who are more appreciated the more they try to look victimized) are automatically true. The world isn't that simple.