Slashdot Mirror
Citizen Journalism Combating Chinese Censorship
teh_commodore writes to tell us that Breitbart has a look at how Citizen Journalism is shining a whole new light on China. "Recognizing the threat of China's growing online community, Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be 'purified', and the government has since launched a number of online crackdowns. [...] 'One cannot truly say that the Internet in China is becoming more and more free, because at the same time as the development of citizen journalists, the government finds ways of blocking or censoring content,' Pain said."
Interesting article, showing how even as the national authorities tighten the reins on internet communications, people in China still make use of the internet to expose corruption & apathy within their local governments.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Interesting to see this posting just a few hours after the posting about our Mechanized Future. Couldn't we say that the internet is helping Chinese fight unwanted censorship... thus improving their lives..
Whenever I hear people in "dear leader" positions throwing around words like purify, patriotism, freedom, etc, it makes me cringe. This is doublespeak; "purify" means "purge."
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
Do they not get what they deserve?
Have they forgot how Chinese invaded Tibet and displaced the Buddhists?
Has anybody forgot Tiananmen Square? They hunted down amateur and professional footage alike so they could go and assassinate the dissidents.
Or in recent times, have they forgot about the forced abortions that the Chinese government puts women through for violating "Birth Law"?
And now they wish to "clean up" the Internet. Awwww. It doesnt fit in their view of authoritarian communism.
Who I do feel sad for are the people who live there, as many of them did NOT bring this upon themselves, however, it IS up to them to free this country of an evil tyranny.
I admit I'm a hopeless optimist, but look at it this way.
Censorship is a tool used when you're losing control. Scary things are about to happen, and China doesn't anyone to know.
I don't know why all these "China & censorship" stories are relevant to slashdot. There's not really any tech angle here.
Is Linux used by these citizen journalists? If not, this stuff shouldn't be here.
Chinese President Hu Jintao called in January for the Internet to be 'purified'
Yes, purified I say. And, squish all bugs. Yes, every single bug is to be found and squished....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
until the government starts spreading fear and terror and death threats.... you know, old commy style, so that even if it is easy to circumvent censorship, people will be so afraid to do so. And then they will have won the cat and mouse game.
What would Al Gore do?
Surely the inventor of the internet would have some solution to the communist censorship.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
I've heard they will pee pee in your coke.
No, it's not the same. Let's take into account the advertisers, first.
Let's say you write a fairly Apple- and Linux-centric blog (we'll call it 'athloidot') and your advertisers, who are Microsoft-centric, demand that you start posting nice things about Microsoft products. You, as the editorial staff, can either bend over and grease up, writing some nice stuff about Vista, or, you can tell the advertisers to politely fuck off and go get yourself another set of advertisers.
Now, the bloggers in China cannot tell the Chinese government to politely fuck off, because that would be a crime punishable by imprisonment, torture, or both.
As for whether it will offend anyone -- well, it hasn't seemed to stop Slashdot, now has it?
My blog
Instead of titling this article: Citizen Journalism Combating Chinese Censorship, wouldn't it be more accurate to have said: Chinese Censorship Combating Citizen Journalism.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
it may be pandora's box, but so far they have managed to keep a lid on the tianemen (sp?) square protest and massacre. Technology is powerful, and governments, who control the money and give the orders, have huge budgets to go towards censorship and control of the major nodes. I think they can manage to both keep their great firewall going, and improve on it, beyond the abilities of most people there to circumvent, should the government choose to make it even more difficult. They could throw another 100,000 netcops at it and not break sweat. They could run more filters, etc, and it wouldn't be a big deal. They also have the ultimate power, arrest, imprisonment and a perfect willingness to execute people for a variety of crimes, and trying to subvert the power of the communist party and the leadership there falls at the top of the list. You pull years at hard labor there for a blog post they don't like, and it gets nastier from that point.
Perhaps Google, Yahoo, and other bastions of the Internet will get right on this if they're asked nicely. They've got a proven track record when it comes to assisting oppressive governments.
There is a lot more freedom there than you would think from reading the western press. Sure, they have censorship, but it's bypassable. China is experiencing unimaginable economic growth, and with that will eventually come some degree of increased personal freedom. I have a hard time explaining it to people who have never been there, but there there is much more "general freedom" in countries like china than in the US. Perhaps someone who understands can explain it better than me.
Just how free is the US anyway? Freedom to assemble is regulated, and freedom of speech, although certainly much greater than in china, is not absolute. We can criticize the president and our other government officials all we want, but nothing changes. Let's think about our own country (and change it, if you like) before we go on bitching about something that's not ours.
I mean, in the first case, even if you say, "Damn the consequences, I'm going to write that article!"... the article gets removed and no one can read it. In the second case, the article remains published any you suffer the consequences. To me, there is a huge distinction there.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How do you organize the memory hole? The problem with censored electronic media is that it eliminates the ability to reference. If your references disappear and organizers are put in jail, there will only be one coherent story.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's not that easy for an oppressed people to free themselves.
.. they murder and rape etc. not just the dissident but also people he/she cares about. So if a dissident is going to mount a resistance he/she has to be aware who else they're "involunteering", because it won't just be the dissident paying the price.
For one thing, you have to hope that a George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc. exist simultaneously around the same time. And also that they have the tools need to mount an effective resistance. Not every country is lucky enough to get people like that.
The other MAJOR problem is the lack of weaponry. You see, people seem to be willing to give up all kinds of liberties when the slightest amount of feart is introduced. Now imagine the threat against you if you government is evil
It may be self satifying to place the blame on being oppressed on the oppressed (after all it liberates any feelings of obligation to help) but that doesn't mean it's the truth.
Amen, brother. It never ceases to amaze me how many people on /. argue that US censorship isn't really censorship because it's "appropriate censorship". We'll be oppressed, just like the Chinese, until more of us finally start to realize that we are.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
[I]Our vision of interconnectedness resonates with new networks of world citizens in nongovernmental organizations linking from numberless centers of energy, expressing the emergence of a new organic whole, seeking unity within and across national lines. New transnational web-based email and telecommunications systems transcend governments and carry within them the power of qualitative transformation of social and political structures and a new sense of creative intelligence. If governments and their leaders, bound by hierarchy and patriarchy, wedded to military might for legitimacy, fail to grasp the implications of an emerging world consciousness for cooperation, for peace and for sustainability, they may become irrelevant.[/I] Part of speech by: U.S. Representative Dennis J. Kucinich Praxis Peace Institute Conference Dubrovnik, Croatia Sunday, June 9, 2002
Now, a lot of peole reading this have some responsibility for web sites with scientific and technical information. My proposal is, anytime you put up a website that has scientific and technical information on it, slide in some of the "blocked" words-- perhaps some words from this list of words. This is going to screw with their censorship strategy.
I think this is a good thing for China. This form of "blogging" will hopefully allow the people of China to talk about subjects that the government will not allow.
And both are leaders in helping the Chinese gov. crush their citizens. God bless those 2.
They are blocking on chinese only. By not blocking english, then they will encourage a number of chinese to learn it or some other language.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
from someone who was in Hong Kong: And once again we choose not to focus too much on certain reports. China is in the midst of a historic buildup of its military. China is cracking down on unofficial news sources and asking citizens to report any unauthorized news postings on the Web./quote)
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
China will be truly free from their commie overlords only when a soviet style revolution happens, or if there's a huge general uprising and overthrow of their beloved "leaders".
China will never become another USA and it is foolish to want that. You'd probably see them becoming a socialist democracy sort of like a combination of India, Germany and Russia. That'll do for now.
As for their inter-tubes, till their yoke is lifted, don't expect any miracles under their current administration.
Here is an interesting documentary dealing with American-style censorship and propaganda in the media. The mechanism may be different, but in the end the public is still being fed misinformation.
Maybe we don't need a Big Brother in this country, we're all conspiring to misinform ourselves.
If you can read Chinese, try http://bbs.people.com.cn/
That's the billboard system hosted on China's highest ranking official propaganda website, controlled directly by the top propaganda division of the communist party. Well, just list a few post titles from the front page:
- What does it tell that 70% of the corruptions and bribes are through the wives and mistresses?
- Reporting the "black kiln" in sadness and horrors.
- Is the Nanjing government going backwards in regulating the housing price?
- 24 ways to expose corrupted officials in mainland China
- Black kiln reminds me of the greatness of Mao Zedong
- Why do the officials pretend they don't know?
Does that sounds like a Gulag or 1984 situation? When did you last see similar posts hosted by either CNN or MSNBC?
>until the government starts spreading fear and terror and death threats....
You are referring to the US govt?
How many countries have we bombed, inaded and overthorwn since WW2?
Seems like terror and death is OUR specialty but we always bring back Tibet.
Dont forget your glass houses people...
They're widely reported, and well-known by the western world. Does this qualify India as a 1984 society?
In the more "communist" China under Mao, the black kiln incident could never have happen. It's the capitalist greedy that makes it happen.
The story is attributed to Agence France-Presse, the French newswire. Breitbart doesn't publish any content of their own; so far as I know, they're just an aggregator.
Dog is my co-pilot.