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China Bans Internet News Reporting As Media Crackdown Widens (bloomberg.com)
Earlier this month we learned that China had banned the use of social media as a news source. The local government feared that if news outlets were to report using signals coming from social media, there was a chance that fake, non-credible, and rumors would slip through the filter. It was absurd, to say the least, considering the government itself has been reportedly caught of posting a copious amount of misleading information on domestic social media platforms. In the latest wrinkle to the whole situation, the world's largest nation is now banning internet news reporting. Long time reader schwit1 shares a Bloomberg report on the same: China's top internet regulator ordered major online companies including Sina Corp. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. to stop original news reporting, the latest effort by the government to tighten its grip over the country's web and information industries. The Cyberspace Administration of China imposed the ban on several major news portals, including Sohu.com Inc. and NetEase Inc., Chinese media reported in identically worded articles citing an unidentified official from the agency's Beijing office. The companies have "seriously violated" internet regulations by carrying plenty of news content obtained through original reporting, causing "huge negative effects," according to a report that appeared in The Paper on Sunday. The agency instructed the operators of mobile and online news services to dismantle "current-affairs news" operations on Friday, after earlier calling a halt to such activity at Tencent, according to people familiar with the situation. Like its peers, Asia's largest internet company had developed a news operation and grown its team. Henceforth, they and other services can only carry reports provided by government-controlled print or online media, the people said, asking not to be identified because the issue is politically sensitive.
>The local government feared that if news outlets were to report using signals coming from social media, there was a chance that fake, non-credible, and rumors would slip through the filter.
That's exactly what happens in the West. Vast piles of BS gets propagated as news on social media, leading to large percentages of the population believing untrue things to be true, more than they already do.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Many Chinese are living in other countries.
This is how the corruption and lies of the elite is known there.
I just wonder how such censure can work out...
They know social media is full of false news because they are the ones posting them.
The below is fiction. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
In an effort to fully control the population China has banned online reporting of news.
This above fiction. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
How can they get the news they want despite the attempted blockage? Our next big thing for the internet is going to be the "ability to route around the damage". I hope it makes the front page when it finally happens.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'm sure this is the unintended consequences of bad intentions, but have you read the BBC lately? Any current even will consists of 2 paragraphs of "reporting" followed by a selection of a dozen tweets hand picked to give the impression of an unbiased sample of public opinion.
Well that, or just straight up "Top 10 things Buzzfeed Claimed Happened This Week"
China wants the internet on their terms. Instead of finding ways to work around the firewall perhaps we should just block China completely. Let them choose between living in the free world or living behind an iron curtain. I'm guessing they want trade more than they want control.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Just a cursory examination of the shit that flies around on sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter or blogs like Gawker or Breitbart during a newsworthy event would be enough to disabuse you of the notion that the internet is capable of reporting news.
...The local government feared that if news outlets were to report using signals coming from social media, there was a chance that fake, non-credible, and rumors would slip through the filter. It was absurd, to say the least...
Was it? Not trying to support censorship of any kind, especially the kind that China practices, but "social media" is well known to spew "fake, non-credible, rumors..."
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
When you are saying "we", does that including the smarter western guys?
China wants the internet on their terms. Instead of finding ways to work around the firewall perhaps we should just block China completely. Let them choose between living in the free world or living behind an iron curtain. I'm guessing they want trade more than they want control.
That might be true, but we (and by we I mean our corporate rulers that off-shored their production to China and elsewhere) want trade about as much as they do so it's not going to happen.
>The local government feared that if news outlets were to report using signals coming from social media, there was a chance that fake, non-credible, and rumors would slip through the filter.
That's exactly what happens in the West. Vast piles of BS gets propagated as news on social media, leading to large percentages of the population believing untrue things to be true, more than they already do.
I think that they have indeed identified a problem. The solution, however, is worse than the problem. Vast piles of BS masquerading as news is bad, but government censorship is far worse.
Provides a channel than can be used for covert information distribution.
Part of me wants to joke about China continuing to move to its own walled garden to control information flow. But then I think about the abysmal state of the media in the US, how most all major news organizations are now for-profit puppets pushing propaganda designed to enrich their owners, even to the point of demonstrating complicity in what would have been a major scandal (you see proof of election fraud and you fire the people collecting the data proving its occurring? really???), and I wonder if anything of value was lost. Media has gone from the "fourth branch of government", providing a historically critical check and balance, to yet another tool of those pulling the strings behind government. I wonder how many people realize the extent to which worldwide institutions are failing...
The Chinese government action cannot be for no reason. Maybe there is something going on that they don't want the people to know.
That's what unfree governments are: absurd. It doesn't matter whether they are theocratic, socialist, communist, fascist, or progressive.
If anything, the erosion of credible mainstream media has caused that phenomenon more than anything. Most people would probably disagree if asked if they distrust mainstream news, but people are learning machines and they do things that they are not always conscious of.
Perhaps there can be a Chinese version of The Onion where stories of fiction with startling "close to reality" reporting can take place. To promote this new story service, a "decoder ring" can be occasionally published to translate OnionSpeak into NewsSpeak for the minor differences.
No actually, the Chinese government wants *control* more than they want trade. Especially since the economy hasn't exactly been firing on all cylinders the last few years. So the government looks at it like this: "Well, even if things aren't that rosy, at least what is still rosy we will have control over". Mao tried first to take Shanghai, but they wouldn't put up with the communism, so he went to the poor countryside where they more readily took to communism. There he raised an army, and then took Shanghai. The purges came during the cultural revolution. There were a few leaders that were very open to reform (Deng Xiaoping), and then somewhat open to reform (Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao), and now we are back to the days of Mao with Xi Jinping (who probably thought that the days of the purges and cultural revolution were a good thing). Some of what the Chinese saw were the good things happining in Hong Kong when the British gave back the lease in 1999, and also the prosperity of Taiwan. But those days are gone, prosperity is dwindling, and the hard liners are back. Tight fisted control is becoming tighter-fisted control. Protests are quashed, media control is at an all time high. Political freedom was never very high in China, but it reached its maximum about 1989 (Tiananmen Square). Since then, things have been ebbing. I would reckon things in China now are like they were in 1980, heading to like they were in 1974. China is slowly turning into a larger version of North Korea.
Trying to decide if this was written by a Chinese expatriate, Hillary Clinton's campaign staff, or Donald Trump.
It looks like Roger Ailes has already found his next job.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The article title confused me. Therefore, to summarize for anyone else wondering: the website operators may continue to report "news" but only "news" that the government gives to them through official channels. Website operators may not find and report on any other news.
Reenact the laws forbidding opinion as news.
It may already be to late to save our country.
Anytime you show opinion you must let the other sides opposing point of view they way we had it before the likes of Faux news.
Outlaw it once again.
Propaganda and political agendas are not and never should be presented to the public as news.
Nothing wrong with "original reporting," or witnessing, as long as it is documented and supported by contextual pictures and video, eyewitnesses willing to go on record, and alternative reports that happen to corroborate.
This is essentially what news reporting is.
Twinstiq, game news
This was about the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinsky scandal...
http://www.spectacle.org/398/h...
The scandal was two-sided...
* Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (did she inhale?)
* Newsweek spiked a well-researched story about Clinton/Lewinsky
Hillary is quoted as saying...
> As exciting as these new developments are.... there are a number of serious
> issues without any kind of editing function or gate-keeping function. What does it mean
> to have the right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?
From the other side of the political spectrum...
> During a 2012 speech to online activists and citizen journalists, former
> Alaska Governor Sarah Palin reminded them that "the new media rose up
> precisely because the old media failed to tell the truth." And she also
> discussed how much Drudge, who was fast becoming a de facto assignment
> editor, upset the legacy press that ridiculed him and tried to diminish his
> influence even though they were obsessively refreshing his home page.
>
> "That very first new media breakthrough was about 15 years ago when this
> lowly little store clerk in a lowly little apartment equipped with his computer
> and a modem broke one of the biggest stories of the decade. His name was
> Matt Drudge and the rest is history," Palin said in 2012. "And in hindsight, we
> see that the story he broke was more than just a president having an affair.
> To me it was much, much more than that. It was about a major
> old media publication that had spiked the story eleven times."
>
> She reminded today's citizen journalists that the mainstream press did not
> spike the Lewinsky story to "check their facts" but "because as charter
> members of that Democrat Media Complex they were protecting their guy."
I'm old enough to remember the JFK "Camelot era". Back then the public didn't know, but Kennedy was screwing everything in a skirt. Bill Clinton was a choir boy in comparison. But the MSM suppressed the story, and JFK was the "all-American boy".
The American lib-left love the MSM, because they control most of it, with the notable exception of Fox. Back in the JFK era, a president could do all sorts of wrongs, and get it hushed up, because the elite controlled the MSM. Today, not so much. Give me a wide-open internet, with different people pushing their different interpretations. I'll sort it out for myself. No thanks, I don't want Hillary editing/gatekeeping the news.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
or capitalist.
Sure there are problems, but the mainstream news has proven to be fairly reliable over the years, most of the time. You would not believe rumours on social media that Bush was responsible for 9/11 because of that.
The problem for China is that once they cripple official sources of news, rumours become much, much more credible. Denials or ignoring of them by state media is meaningless. They potentially make the problem much worse.
Except that most Chinese, even more so than Americans, are sheep. With a few wolves among them.
It's a sane, coherent and reasoned post, and you're asking if it was by Donald Trump?