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Musings and occasional
rants by Rebecca MacKinnon, a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger.
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http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2006/01/microsoft_takes.html
Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked
by the Chinese government.
Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often
pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. (See a
recent profile of him here, and an
interview
with Anti here.) His old blog at the U.S.-hosted Blog-city is believed to
have caused the Chinese authorities to block all Blog-city blogs. In the final
days of December, Anti became a vocal supporter of journalists at the
Beijing Daily News who walked off the job after the top editors were
fired for their increasingly daring investigative coverage, including some
recent reporting on the
recent
police shootings of village protestors in the Southern China. (For all
the gory details on the current press crackdown click
here, here,
here, and
here.)
Roland Soong at ESWN has preserved the original Chinese-language posts of
Anti’s Call for a Beijing
News Walk Out and his
Call to Cancel Beijing News Subscriptions.
Roland also
points to the
likelihood that MSN’s takedown of Anti’s blog could be the result of dirty
politics being played by at least one person at
Bokee, China’s largest domestically-owned
blog hosting company – and naturally, a business rival of MSN spaces. The ESWN
blog has a translation
of a column on Bokee’s website which basically denounces MSN for hosting Anti.
An excerpt of the column:
Anti's moving over the MSN is a severely deplorable event in
the development of Chinese blogging. By moving his blog to MSN, he will
influence a group of others to move their blogs to MSN.
Furthermore, we need to reflect: of all the BSP's that Anti
has used, how come only MSN was not shut down? Here, we must admire the
cunning public relations methods of MSN. We must also think that the Internet
supervision departments are negligent about monitoring and controlling blogs,
and that they have been lax with respect to MSN. Our bottom line are being
backed up step by step, and our market is being eroded step by step.
We issue the call: Rise up, and oppose the Microsoft
monopoly of 2.0.
Etc, etc. Basically this author is calling on the
authorities to put more pressure on MSN to censor more vigorously.
Roland reacts at ESWN:
The Bokee columnist wrote that the government's Internet
supervisory department should be paying attention to Anti's blog as well as
MSN Spaces. Well, they did. Whether this is the true reason or not (and we
will never know for sure), Bokee is going to go down in Internet history as
calling in the Internet police to crack down on a blogger for exercising his
constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and the police did just that,
and the motivation of Bokee was commercial in nature (that is, they want to
use the government's security apparatus to damage MSN Spaces as a
competitor). I know that this is one columnist's opinion, but Bokee had
better make it very clear that they did not support that opinion AND also
they do not support the disappearance of the Anti blog.
This is particularly interesting in light of
the observations I made in November on my trip to China: that the Chinese
blogging scene is very divided and factionalized, and that the commercial blog
hosting companies see people like Anti as a threat to their business.
Now, back to Microsoft’s MSN and what they do, and how…
As it so happens, in mid-December I played around a bit with
Chinese language blog-hosting tools to try and get a better idea of how they
censor blogger content. I haven’t posted about it yet partially because
family business and vacation got in the way, and partially because I
wanted to do a few more tests. But given what happened to Anti I think I had
better not wait.
Back over the summer I wrote a post titled
Screenshots of
Censorship about how MSN spaces was censoring the titles of its Chinese
blogs, but not posts themselves. According to my testing in mid-late December,
they now censoring much more intensely.
On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make
various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post
entries with titles like “Tibet
Independence” or “Falun
Gong” (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: “This
item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this
item.”
Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog
was moved or removed at the server level and that the blog remains
inaccessible from the United States as well as from China. This means that the
action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering and
censoring the internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of
the MSN servers.
I did similar tests with five other Chinese blog-hosting
services. They all work differently when it comes to censoring user content,
but they all engage in some form of filtering or censorship of user content.
Interestingly, I found that Bokee had no mechanism preventing me from posting
anything in the titles or text bodies of the posts. But eventually, blogs with
politically sensitive words in them (like “Falun Gong,” “Tiananmen massacre”
and “Tibet independence”) were taken down in what appeared to be a human
screening process, perhaps assisted by some kind of keyword search or alert
system. Other blog hosting services use a combination of automated systems and
human procedures similar to MSN’s, although MSN was definitely #1 when it came
to full takedown response time. At least one of the services allows you to
post anything, but replaces politically sensitive words with “****” when they
appear. I have decided not to go into a detailed naming of names and specifics
about who censors more strictly and who censors more loosely than whom, since
that will only result in some people getting in trouble – or as the Bokee
editorial against MSN shows, some blog-hosting companies trying to curry favor
with the authorities may try to sic the goons on those who take a
lighter-handed approach to, er, user content management…
Can we say, snakepit? It’s actually not uncommon in China
for people in one company to actively “tattle” on their rivals and get them
into political trouble in order to gain a competitive business advantage. I
saw it happen several times in the media and entertainment worlds when I was
living and working in Beijing. This is one reason the communist party will
stick around longer than many outsiders think. Businesses get greedy and try
to manipulate the authoritarian system to their advantage, rather than working
together to make the whole thing more fair, accountable, and transparent.
Microsoft clearly isn’t taking the high road either.
A slight postscript: John over at Sinosplice has
posted an exchange with Roland of ESWN about why ESWN isn’t blocked, and
they speculate as to why my blog has been blocked in China for the past
several months. John says it is currently not being blocked, or at least not
from his ISP (internet service provider). Just to clarify: as far as I know,
this blog was inacessible in China because since June all
Typepad blogs appeared to have been blocked. When I visited China in
November, this blog and all other Typepad blogs I tried to access were
blocked. If it is now unblocked, it is because all of Typepad must be
unblocked on at least some Chinese ISP’s. I am not aware that my blog has been
specifically targeted for filtering up to this point.
UPDATE (12:45pm EST Tuesday):
Robert Scoble is angry about MSN's censorship. He is looking into it and
has sent a message to his colleagues: "Guys over at MSN: sorry, I don’t agree
with your being used as a state-run thug."
He is also inviting Michael Anti to be a guest blogger on
his blog
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