Beijing’s Control Of The Internet
Shortly after christmas, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opened an account on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog service that, like Twitter, allows users to share short messages of up to 140 characters. Kristof began testing what topics would be censored. He found out quickly. One of his first messages was "Can we talk about Falun Gong?" — a reference to the spiritual movement banned by Beijing. Within an hour of his first post, Kristof's account was canceled.
At first glance it would seem that China's new Internet is a lot like its old Internet. Overseas sites that are deemed sensitive — including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, among thousands of others — are blocked, part of a network of control sometimes called the Great Firewall of China. Inside the wall, Chinese search engines won't, for example, link to content to do with the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo or Tibetan independence; also, domestic Internet companies are required to delete any material that the authorities find objectionable. Even as China's Netizens have rushed to embrace Web 2.0, an Internet in which users are more closely and quickly linked by social-networking services, microblogs and free video hosting, those rules have still applied. ...
Wary of Egypt Unrest, China Censors Web
BEIJING — In another era, China’s leaders might have been content to let discussion of the protests in Egypt float around among private citizens, then fizzle out.
But challenges in recent years to authoritarian governments around the globe and violent uprisings in parts of China itself have made Chinese officials increasingly wary of leaving such talk unchecked, especially on the Internet, the medium some officials see as central to fanning the flames of unrest.
So the arbiters of speech sprang into action over the weekend. Sina.com and Netease.com — two of the nation’s biggest online portals — blocked keyword searches of the word “Egypt,” though the mass protests were being discussed on some Internet chat rooms on Monday. Searching for “Egypt” has also been blocked on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter....
