Slashdot Mirror
New MySpace China Tells Users to Spy on Each Other
Anonymous Chinese Coward writes "MySpace has launched in China, the world's most populous nation, but this definitely is NOT the MySpace you're used to. Members are told to click a button to report any 'misconduct' by other users. MySpace's definition of 'misconduct' includes actions such as 'endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order' — according to the site's terms and conditions. In China these are all crimes which carry a hefty prison sentence. Any attempt to post content containing phrases that the Chinese government doesn't like, such as 'Taiwanese independence', the banned 'FaLun' religious movement or the Dalai Lama, produces the following message. 'Sorry, the article you want to publish may contain inappropriate content. Please delete the unsuitable content, and then try reposting it. Thank you.'"
I'm sure they can say it in a free speech zone.
Even if they do, I bet they can be hacked by chinese.
I hope they catch as much crap for this as Yahoo and Google have for their apparent misconduct on their Chinese counterparts.
Coming from a county who's idea of law enforcement are execution busses where the driver is judge, jury and executioner and ALSO harvests organs from the bodies of the dead, this one autta be a fun one.
:O.
They don't solve their own crime issues, they make it worse by killing innocents and leaving the real rapists and murderers to run amok. This forces the population to look after their own, and makes them strong, which makes issues for a central government that runs amok, especially when your people have weapons.
I predict the government won't know what to do...especially when I can make a bot to press all the buttons 5 times a second
On which country on the earth these are totally free actions? That's not specific to China, they just want to control it, which is fine. Every country have their own regulations to protect their own sensitivity to a matter. In US it's racism, in Europe it's mostly ethnical discrimation of genocide. In China their worries are different due to their history. There's no such a country which would let people to do some action to broke nations unity. Yes it's censorship. Yes it is annoying to some. But that's the price of living whealty. That's the price of surviving with limited resources. If anyone thinking wars, which created those worries, are due to greed of people, then those are either fools or the ones behave like that. All wars are due to survival instincts of people. You might not have problems today, but you need to think your future as well, else our bodies won't store any energy, will it?
Many countries (the UK certainly does, and perhaps the US too) have schemes where you're rewarded financially for telling the police about anyone who's up to no good.
Since the Chinese equivalent of most services are so perverted as per the governments requirements Don't be evil, why are they used at all. Not sure how MUCH safer it would be to use MSN messenger vs tencent QQ, for example, since i'm sure MS would hand any information over as soon as it was requested, but chinese language versions of most online services are out these, and at least the servers can't physically be ceased.
Those last two, "spreading rumours or disturbing the social order" are vague enough to include absolutely anything.
I look forward to slashdot.cn with moderation options -1 Endangeringnationalsecurity and -1 Godirectlytojaildonotcollect200RMB
Wouldn't it really annoy the chinese government if there was a botnet that, say, registered and posted inflammatory material as entirely fictional "users"? Thousands upon thousands of them?
Wonder how intelligent the matching is - in english you can often evade automated stuff by writing "f \/ c k" instead of "fuck" etc. Wonder what the equivalent for chinese would be - ascii art of the ideograms?
The phrases and keywords that are considered "bad" may be different, but this is no different than the policies currently in place by the regime in Washington, DC. King George rattles on about threats to national security, activities that are unpatriotic, etc, every time someone goes against him. The only difference between the current US Government and the Chinese government in this respect is the Chinese government doesn't hide the fact that they're doing it.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Thr real genius here isn't in the addition of the button per se, but rather in putting it in front of emo kids.
"I don't want to live any more, I'm going to end it all! *clicks on own Myspace button*
MySpace's definition of 'misconduct' includes actions such (...) or disturbing the social order'
And how is this different from writing up an essay and getting busted for misdeamnor ? SLashdot article from a few hours/day ago.
So? These are standard terms of service for any online service in China. The keyword filtering, likewise, is standard -- and if Myspace weren't doing it, the Great Firewall would be blocking access to the site every time the filter got tripped. So how is any of this newsworthy?
This is nothing we haven't seen before and nothing we won't be seeing again. The Chinese government will go to great lengths for its powerlust and especially to protect itself from the people, and every year the march of technology hands them more power. So what can we do about it? Making brooding, cynical posts is the usual M.O. and the generated online badwill has no doubt brough them to their knees. How can we do what little we can to end this obscenity?
Run Tor?
Join Amnesty International and buy some of their nifty hoodies?
Hold a public protest?
Boycott Chinese goods (yeah, right)?
Organize a fuck-off massive online attack and hammer on the Great Firewall? ("one of the most important projects for ensuring its political power..." indeed.)
Help me out here.
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/11 2645487/article.pl
/. /.'d?
> 500 Internal Server Error
>
> An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.
Probably the most important thing about censorship [both at Myspace and internet search engines] is to make it voluntary by making rules as vague as possible. People already know what they shouldn't discuss if they don't want to land in a jail: questionable religions, rumors involving military, other sensitive things that matter for the government. So the whole message is "Here's a new cool site; the rules are as usual".
You can always trust a Murdoch owned company to whore out completely and totally to anyone that asks if there's money to be made, none of that namby-pamby google-style conscience here.
Get over it. http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_(A_to_Z)/ Stocks_I/threadview?m=tm&bn=9010&tid=436554&mid=43 6554&tof=3&frt=2
Look for "Report Abuse"
Yahoo! in the US has the same bloody thing. Until they arrest someone or go beyond kicking the person off the site, this is not news.
> 'endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government,
> undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order'
I'm speechless. No, literally!
I wish the look-at-the-others-stories passed by Zonk had a button to increase journalism.
It's not a sustainable stable solution to the censorship, it helps China save face and claim it still has control. I suppose those who wants to share information freely already use anonymizers and encrypted traffic.
You can't detect/censor encrypted traffic, unless you ban all of the encrypted traffic.
China will open up, but by the looks of it, it'll be a slow and painful process (pun not intended).
...a country in which citizens are told to be vigilant and watch out for suspicious people who may be up to no good. A country where someone could go to jail for something they wrote, whether on a myspace page or as part of a creative writing assignment. I'm sure glad I don't live in such a country.
Most of the rest of the world has it better!!!!!!!!!!!
While I agree that those topics should be openly discueed, the idea of "Tells Users to Spy on Each Other" is hardly a new thing. Every free upload website has a small button to report "inapproate" content like expilicit, violence. And in physical/real life, isn't it called community watch?
Is it really My Space if China has control over it?
... complaining about the moderators results in a modding down. I wonder why I could have thought anything different.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
"Members are told to click a button to report any 'misconduct' by other users."
Ah, right - same as Craig's List and....and...and...on & on. How is this a problem?
In someone's weak mind, maybe - in reality, no.
If there are formattting tags that can be inserted into the myspace profiles/blogs, what would stop people from writing one of the forbidden words or phrases, and putting empty tags inbetween the words to fool the filter since the tags don't show up? I mean, if a forum filters the word "shit" , it is possible to type out "sh[b][/b]it"* and have the word come put uncensored, it's a matter of making it work in this situation.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
"Dear User:
If you see any content that is likely to be perceived as causing offense to someone on behalf of their race, religion or beliefs, national background, gender or sexual preference, please report it here. We will take swift action and cooperate with law enforcement where appropriate. We are proud to have received the "Online safety and inclusiveness" award from a coalition of 15 leading universities for our work in ensuring this environment is safe and welcoming for everyone.
We will also in the coming months be looking to implement a system for validating user identities. How to do this in a reliable and easy way is still being discussed, but you can be assured that the details would be kept very secure at a third-party non-online location and only accessible to officials with the proper legal authority"
China just emphasises the 'rights' of the country as a whole not to be insulted or offended, while Western movements and ideologies emphasises the 'rights' of individuals. In both cases however breaching those rights leads to exclusion from the site and lots of personal inconvenience and even direct bodily pain, from various parts of organised state movements and law enforcement, organised nongovernmental ideological movements and/or individuals taking action.
If people can restrain themselves from offending individuals in the West, I am sure they can manage to restrain themselves from offending the state in China. Besides, it is only crass and offensive remarks that are disallowed, not academic discussion, unless of course the academic discussion goes into unwelcome territory.
I'm going to have to agree with the anonymous troll on this one. It's not our place to worry about the freedoms of Chinese people (unless you're posting from China). If things get bad enough, they'll have to revolt and toss out their own leaders. We can't intervene each time we disagree with how leaders are running their countries. It's the responsibility of the citizens to keep their leaders in check.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Well, with only skimming the site with searches in English I've already found multiple examples of pages that are not, in fact, censored. Maybe this article is full of shit?
...any instance of ungoodspeak to the Ministry of Love. So what's the problem?
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I did not think I could hate Myspace more than I do already. I guess I was wrong.
reeFay ibetTay!
Set up a spider that will click the button on every profile there.
Investigate that, China!
So much for it being the PEOPLE'S republic of China, eh? China is so far removed from being a "republic" as you can get.
-Kinsey
But the real question is, does Murdoch secretly crave a society where people are all conformists and report on each other's objections to the holy unquestionable government? If you watch the fair and balanced perspective offered by Fox News, it seems this is their goal for the U.S.
When did the Republican party start running China? Sounds like their dream Patriot Act to me.
Notice the last few entries, they are "communist party", and the names of the current and former presidents. Hack... if people are not allowed to discuss Zhao Ziyang and Dalai Lama, then the communist party and its leaders should be banned from our websites.
I actually told people that this is my invention. and I encourage other websites to do so.
Slashdot stories on China always descend quickly into a lot impassioned people spouting knowledgeably about the oppressive regime, freedoms of speech, executions and God knows what else with more spittle in the air than a Yunan railway carriage. However probably these mostly come from people who have spent little or no time here.
I know a little about this subject as I live in China, speak the language to an ok level, have more Chinese friends than westerners and am just generally interested in what goes on around me, China's history and present state. I am no expert though, the subject is just too big for any one person to know more than a little.
My comments are first that, you should ditch the notion of China as an oppressive society. I am not saying that there are no restrictions, those are well documented, but you can live your life, travel freely, own your own place (most people here do), start a business, choose a good school for the kids, receive adequate health care, buy the latest consumer goods, watch 30 channels of TV in various languages and even post to slashdot with no problems. Actually I find chinese to be pretty accepting of new ideas and tolerant of each other, certainly they don't really care what strangers think of them.
The biggest restrictions in society are money related, westerners will never understand the problems of the poor so I won't attempt to describe them. But I will say that people here are rarely desperate, they have the basics and most importantly they are seeing improvements in their lives every day. There is real and realistic hope for the future and people are uncompromising in their desire to improve themselves and their children. The speed of development and modernisation here is unbelievable.
On the subject of freedom, there is a different attitude here than in the west, certainly the Chinese don't feel oppressed, and this is a country that knows oppression when it sees it. A common attitude here is that, "Well America is certainly very free."... "But perhaps they are a little too free." It is not that the Chinese follow like sheep they certainly don't but they believe that without certain controls society can crumble, and many believe that America is an example of that.
On the subject of freedom of speech, China has had the worst examples of what speech can do. Remember Mao formed a cult of personality targeting young teenagers almost through the force of his rhetoric alone, his Red Guards started running their schools, teachers were beaten to death, running battles occurred over who was more loyal to Mao, thousands of intellectuals were shipped to the countryside to do forced labour and maybe millions died. The cultural revolution affected everyone, and everyone over a certain age has stories of it. It is acknowledged as an utter disaster by the Chinese government, even though they believe Mao's earlier actions redeem him somewhat.
The conclusion is that the common attitudes in China towards freedoms and freedom of speech are different from western values. Although it is valuable to have the spotlight of international attention on the country, we should also judge relative issues such as freedoms in the light of the people they are applied to.
To all the self-righteous finger-pointing from the moral high ground:
Your precious principle of freedom of speech can be, and has been interpreted differently from your own country's court. This is especially true when the interpreter is from a totally different background, whose country has been invaded, robbed, partially colonized, weakened, and infested by wars for more than 100 years. Under that circumstance, understand it or not, the unification of the nation, it sovereignty and independence as a nation is deemed by many people as much more important than the freedom of an individual.
Also, your precious principle of freedom of speech may not work the way you think it should in the reality of the international relations. Chinese know this for a long time, e.g.:
- In 1840 the principle of free trade was extended to the free trade (or export) of opium to China, and was used as the excuse for the 1840 war against China which was the starting point of 100 years' sad history. Now when a strong and united China demands free trade from your part of the world, suddenly the principle of free trade becomes stale and can be overridden by anything from national security to labor condition, and, unsurprisingly, human rights condition and freedom of speech.
- Ever since 1840 till the communist took over China, the principle of sovereignty was extended to the point that China practically had no sovereignty over westerners living in China. They could kill and rape(yeah don't be surprised that GIs actually did that) without the worry of justice being forced upon them. Now when China demands its sovereignty be respected, that principle was soon deemed as trivial, and you're throwing around all those new vocabulary like the axis of evil, rogue countries, preemptive strike, blah blah.
There's no need to show how the freedom of speech has been turned into propaganda against China. But one thing is for sure. If China ever pick up your principle and demand you to apply it to your own country (a recent example is the bickering on the "Great Wall package" entering Canada's TV market), you surely can invent something else to override it. So, here you see it, Chinese government is not playing your game as much as possible. Whatever you call it, totalitarian or George Orwell's 1984 or communist, China will do whatever that suits them better.
And as a Chinese I think continuing the current economic growth is of vital importance to China's future, so I support the policy to act strongly against anything that can disrupt it, from Xinjiang / Tibet independence to block western efforts to incite turmoils in China. I think there's a similar thing going on in the US, which is called the Patriot Act.
Members are told to click a button to report any 'misconduct' by other users. MySpace's definition of 'misconduct' includes actions such as 'endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order' -- according to the site's terms and conditions. In China these are all crimes which carry a hefty prison sentence.
..." is not a crime in, say, America? I find it hard to imagine that these things are not crimes in every country. The fact that this is enshrined in law in China means that you have no excuse for not knowing that you can get punished for it. Isn't that better than the vague and woolly 'suspicion of terror' which can send you to jail in both the US and UK without ever seeing a court, without knowing what you are accused of, with no time limit and no right to a lawyer?
And of course, "endangering national secureity,
It amazes me how the Chinese leadership consistently violates the basic human rights of its citizens through paranoid censorship of the media and the networking activities of its citizens. The United Nations should stand up to the Chinese on this and make them change their restrictive, stifling and repulsive attitudes towards their citizens. Ikey Benney http://mscsrrr.typepad.com/
The creator of $100,000 monthly for life system. http://www.secret33.com/home-based-business-progr