China Bans Military Personnel From Blogging

eldavojohn writes "China has banned all 2.3M members of its military from blogging — even personal, non-military blogs. From the announcement of the new regulation: 'Soldiers cannot open blogs on the Internet no matter (whether) he or she does it in the capacity of a soldier or not. The Internet is complicated and we should guard against online traps.' While the official word seems to not be translated to English yet, the same apparently goes for websites or homepages owned by soldiers; there is no indication as to whether or not this applies to sites like Facebook or Renren (which the USMC bans). Similarly, as of 2007, the US requires active duty soldiers to clear any posting with a superior officer, and Israel had to cancel an operation due to a Facebook status update. A military blog aggregating site claims only a few Chinese military blogs indexed, but it looks like as of June 15 that list may have shortened."

Comments

USMC

[allcaps]

To clear any ambiguity, the USMC does not forbid Marines from using Facebook or any other social Networking site. They only disallow access on their own INTRAnet.

"The ban ... only applies to Marine Corps networks and computers, allowing Marines to access the sites on their own computers or at Internet cafes." -tinyurl.com/nnymlj [cnn.com]