Slashdot Mirror
China Prosecuted Internet Policeman In Paid Deletion Cases
hackingbear writes: "In China, censorship is not just about politics; it's also a vibrant business. Police in Beijing have detained at least ten people, including employees at web giant Baidu and a web censor working at the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau (cached version), over allegations that they deleted defamatory online posts about companies and government enterprises in return for money, the Beijing News reports. The case was first surfaced when Baidu noticed and reported several of its workers' illegal activities. From 2010 to 2012, Gu, an ex-Baidu employee, is believed to have deleted over 2,000 posts on Baidu, 500 on news site Sohu and 20 posts on qianlong.com, with over 2 million yuan ($322,000) reportedly changing hands. While Gu can delete negative Internet posts for topics ranging from environmental issues to product quality problems on behalf of companies, he could not delete posts relating to his government clients. So he paid and asked Liu, a Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau web censor, to issue official orders to the web sites to remove the posts (Google translation of Chinese original). Liu was found to have accepted 770,000 yuan ($124,000) from Gu for deleting posts. He also received 150,000 yuan ($24,000) from other sources."
"Aardvark Oppressed Anthill Insects in Fed Excavation Forages."
That's about as much as I understood from that headline. Is the headline talking about China-prosecuted Internet-Policement or how China Prosecuated an Internet Policeman. Or did China Prosecute the Internt, by paying a policeman to do it.
I'm sick of these Lumpen-Intelligentia creative disasters appearing everywhere like buzzfeed headlines on a sidebar. For god's sake, try to write something people can read without needing to do double takes.
May the Maths Be with you!
Isn't it all really rather odd. China is prosecuting censorship of the variety that is the real intention behind censorship in the west. Censorship for the protection of society in the west is just the masquerade to hide paid censorship controlled by PR=B$ agencies and you can bet it will never ever be prosecuted in the West. Oh sure they'll get caught, as they already have been but everyone will tut tut and pretend like it never happened and try to do it again and again and again, often only to bring focus to what they are trying to hide.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
just keep enough distance between you and that insane (and dangerous) country.
I unfortunately cannot, and the more I learn about it and its people, the more I want to run away screaming. Which I will probably do at some point.
Corruption in China is a fact of life. It's systemic and pervasive. As much as the government talks about stamping it out, they only inflict pin pricks. They make WAY too much money through corruption and it's widely known/accepted in Chinese society. One need only look at the sheer numbers of government functionaries who send their kids overseas to school and who keep huge sums of ill-gotten money in foreign bank accounts. These are kids who have parents with official salaries are often less than US$15k a year and they're parked in posh apartments (paid for in cash), studying at top 20 universities (paid in cash), driving around in fancy cars, living a lavish lifestyle, etc. There's very little effort made to hide it.
The people who benefit from this system are shitting their pants about potential discontent from those who aren't benefiting from the game. One of Mao's rallying cries was stamping out corruption. Once he got into power (by force), those folks were systematically rooted out, jailed, and often killed. Small wonder more and more of these "government officials" are sneaking money and family out of the country and applying for foreign passports. They know there will be a purge following this binge.
Fasten your seatbelts.
And giving people the ability to quash freespeech is not a good combination with corruption.