Publish and Be Deleted
March 2nd, 2010
The Global Times, the official English-language online newspaper of the Chinese government, recently published an expose about the arbitrariness closure of accounts on Chinese social networking sites and the wholesale shutdown of entire websites by authorities. The article, entitled” Publish and Be Deleted“, is as telling in its very existence as the content of its exhaustively interviewed article. Throughout the entire article bloggers and social networkers and even website managers talk about how arbitrarily applied censorship regulations are applied. Photos, poetry, commentary can all disappear from cyberspace in a matter of moments. The article also discusses the demise of the social networking phenomenon Fanfou, which authorities axed just after the Xinjiang riots, and Yeeyan, which translated internationalnews for Chinese domestic consumption. Yeeyan reopened after it simply stopped posting pieces on politics.
Further reading: WSJ
Previous posts:
When Big Brother Might Be Your Own Brother
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