The New York Times explains just one example of how China’s internet censorship regime works in reality: Jiaozuo, a city southwest of Beijing, deployed 35 Internet commentators and 120 police officers to defuse online attacks on the local police after a traffic dispute. By flooding chat rooms with pro-police comments, the team turned the tone…
Showing all posts tagged China
Journalists shouldn’t be silenced by Singapore
An important essay by the New York Times’ Public Editor about the limits a Western news organisation should go to when appeasing dictatorships. I understand the dilemma but surely being able to write freely is paramount. And if one can’t write that, say, the leader of Singapore is an autocrat, then how much influence can…
Signs of life inside North Korea
After my book The Blogging Revolution was released, I was constantly asked why I hadn’t examined North Korea. I always said it was simply because the internet barely existed in the Communist nation. Now, via the New York Times, a glimpse: North Korea, one of the world’s most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat:…
Google slaps down Australia
Is Australia trying to look foolish or do they truly want to look like a bumbling authoritarian state? The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has launched a stinging attack on Google and its credibility in response to the search giant’s campaign against the government’s internet filtering policy. In an interview on ABC Radio last night, Senator…
Google helps clarify what web freedom should mean?
Does the web need a bill of rights? Jeff Jarvis writes in the Guardian that Google’s recent move in China is significant: Google’s business strategy is dead simple: the more we use the internet, the more Google makes. If governments are allowed and enabled to restrict freedom on the internet to a lowest common denominator…
The Age on Google’s move highlights the role of China’s censors
My following article is published today in the Melbourne Age: About 100 Chinese citizens gathered outside Google’s Beijing office this week to sing the popular tune Grass Mud Horse. They paid their respects to the web giant after it announced the closure of its censored Chinese search engine and redirected users to a Hong Kong-based…
Beijing is nervous and insecure and Google has made it worse
Evan Osnos, writing in the New Yorker, laments the rise of a supposed new super-power: As Americans living in China at this moment in its history, many of us have fashioned an image of a country that is moving—in its own shambling pattern of fits and starts—toward something better for itself and the world. Sure,…
Google: we haven’t really shut-down our Chinese business
The New York Times praises Google’s decision to (finally) challenge China’s draconian censorship laws but Google’s David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer, offers James Fallows at the Atlantic an insider’s view: It may not be quite obvious that this is not really a “shutdown” of either our operations in China or of our mainland…
Even dictatorships are against Israeli colonies
Guess who’s also opposed to Israel’s ever-expanding occupation? Two authoritarian regimes, China and Sri Lanka.