Accidentally in Code

Tag: censorship

  • Google vs. Censored Internet

    Can't see, can't speak, can't hear
    Credit: flickr / kirikiri

    Of course, I’ve been following the debate about Google leaving China and the fallout. There’s a good summary in the NYT, as well as a piece on Sergey Brin and his childhood in the Soviet Union. I really love the evil meter.

    I was in China in 2007 for about 3 months. I’d braced myself for a different internet experience, but mostly it was OK. I couldn’t get the BBC news, but I think I could get The Times. I kept track of my journeys and experiences on Blogger, and my email worked just fine.

    Of course, I was in China temporarily and knew I could search for Tiananmen Square when I got home. I wasn’t concerned about finding information, I was concerned about going about my day to day internet activities, which were mostly fine. I was in Yantai, but later on I went to Beijing and Shanghai, where the internet was more open. Towards the end of my trip, I found myself in Yangshao where it seemed like every site I tried to access redirected me to Baidu (the Chinese search engine). It made sense to me that in a place where there was such extreme poverty coupled with a large number of wealthy tourists the internet would be restricted, although a friend said it might not be censorship, but more a question of paying for access.

    I was back in China last summer, and so I was there as the internet shut down. As Facebook was restricted, and Twitter became inaccessible. At one point, the wiki that contained our teaching materials was unavailable as well.

    2 years – and the situation hadn’t got better. In fact, it was worse. And we ignore this, in the West, the fact that people’s internet freedoms have been taken away. This seems a little wrong to me. When I was there, we all thought, oh it’ll be back soon. But more than 6 months later, it hasn’t come back.

    So I admire Google’s stance. Censorship is not okay. Things are not getting better. And maybe Google pulling out of China won’t help, but acknowledging the problem is a start.

  • Facebook Lite

    I’m quite excited about this, it’s being talked up in the press as a way for people with slow connections to access the site, but having recently been living somewhere where the internet was heavily censored, I’m more excited that accessing Facebook through a proxy site will be easier and a better experience.

  • The Great Firewall of China

    I’m writing this from beyond the Great Firewall of China. Twitter went down two weeks ago. Facebook went down a couple of days later. There’s rioting going on and the irony is – if I didn’t want to know why Facebook and Twitter were down I probably never would have known anything about it.

    It’s similar to what’s been going on in Iran. Governments afraid of what people may say have always sought to control the internet because they have always seen the threat. But – now the web is a communication medium, they have to stop the conversation. Which is a whole lot harder. The Chinese government can block twitter.com, but it took them a while to block peoplebrowsr.com. Even when that was down, I can always text Twitter from my British cell phone. And despite WordPress.com being blocked I’m still managing to publish this using a handy application a 14-year old in my class showed me.

    Of course, unless they switch off the internet (which will never happen – it’s too important for commerce) people will find ways to keep the conversation going. It’s fairly easy to get around, what I’m using doesn’t even need much technical know-how – just a degree of tolerance for the x-rated advertisements that pop up. I always thought the GFW was pointless, because technologically it’s hard for the governent to keep up with the people trying to find a way through. What’s been surprising to me is how many people just accept it and wait for block to lift. They dislike it, complain about it… but ultimately just deal with it and put their conversations on hold for a while. However, apparently this is the longest it’s been blocked – I wonder how people will be coping if it’s blocked for another week – or two.

    Update: Interesting article about the popularity of social media in China.