We all know about China’s extreme censorship, but recently it seems like they’ve taken the word “censorship” to a whole different level of crazy. A Carnegie Mellon University study analyzed blogging sites and found out that 212,583 out of more than 1.3 million (16 percent) checked messages had been deleted. All of the messages have included banned phrases such as “Tibet”, “brainwash”, and even the banned phrase “iodized salt”. Yes, iodized salt. This phrase was banned in an attempt to mitigate the rumors that the compound was able to prevent radiation poisoning.
Not only is the Chinese government deleting messages and banning ridiculous phrases, but they’re increasing their strict censorship. Soon it will become mandatory for bloggers to register with their legitimate names. This will make it more difficult for them to anonymously say illegal statements, and as a result they will be more wary when typing away.
But, major props must be given to the Chinese people, having created clever ways to evade the censors. They use slang or homophones instead of direct terminology, Romanized letters which are unable to be flagged by the censor search engines, and they also sometimes use images instead of the written word or phrase.
I was just reading this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/words-censored-on-chinese-twitter_n_1367175.html?ref=world
ReplyDeleteIt's about the words banned on a site like Twitter in China, and some were slang and just ridiculous.. like 'yellow'?
But anyways, people are going to just get more and more clever and sneaky about getting their words and opinions out there. It can't be easy for the government to monitor that many people on the internet.
I agree with Tiia - the internet is gigantic. I feel like the Chinese government is just eventually going to do one of two things 1) only allow people to have internet if the government can constantly track what they're doing or 2) get rid of internet to regular Chinese people all together.
ReplyDeleteTheir censorship is just getting more and more insane, which is forcing Chinese people to just get more creative with how they say things.
China will have an incredibly hard time censoring everything and of course things will get through. That's the problem Putin has had in Russia. But like Tiia said, there are words that are "code-words" both here and in China. A few of the code words in the US are pork, clouds, and San Diego. I think the internet is acting as a medium for the government to become more involved in citizen's lives.
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ReplyDeleteI also read somewhere...I have no idea where...but bloggers also use letters that are only slightly altered so that you can still tell what it is supposed to be, but computers cannot pick it up as what it is. I imagine to be sort of like the trend of using "q"s for "g"s.
Anyway, if they're censoring things like iodized salt...how long do you think it could be before they make people register with their real names? And we all know that that will just decrease the amount of bloggers or the Chinese people will find some other clever way around it. The internet is full of possibilities.
The internet seems to give people more freedom, but in reality the internet can act as a kind of "trap" to track what people are doing. Certain websites are like mousetraps - if they go on them, the government will know and be able to check on them and their computer.
ReplyDeleteThat is crazy. I, like most people, take the internet for-granted. I don't know how I'd feel if my government took something like this away from me.
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