Censorship in China


How Microsoft Censors Blogs in China

When Microsoft launched MSN Spaces in China in June 2005, attempts to create blogs with words including 'democracy', 'human rights' and 'freedom of expression' in the title were blocked, producing an error message in Chinese which translates to 'You must enter a title for your space. The title must not contain prohibited language, such as profanity. Please type a different title.' Subsequent tests showed that MSN also blocked use of certain terms such as 'Tibet Independence' and 'Falun Gong' in the title of blogs. Tests carried out by Amnesty International in June 2006 demonstrated the continuing blocking of certain terms, including 'Tiananmen incident' in the title of blogs.

Microsoft in its statements has tried to blur the distinction between 'blocking' users from carrying out searches and 'filtering' the results of searches. This obscures the fact that Microsoft's China-based search engine (MSN China) filters the results of searches for politically sensitive terms. What this means, for example, is that of the total potential sites that could be retrieved in doing a search on, say, 'Tiananmen Square', a certain number of these will be removed by the search engine itself. In conducting a search for a politically sensitive term using 'beta.search.msn.com.cn', a page comes up that states in Chinese: 'Certain content was removed from the results of this search'. Searches undertaken in June 2006 produced this message for terms including 'Falun Gong', 'Tibet independence' and 'June 4' (date of Tiananmen Square massacre). Of the results that are given for such terms, there is a predominance of official sites and others sanctioned by the government. This amounts to censorship.

In the absence of full disclosure of the terms that Microsoft restricts, and information on whether Chinese language terms are more likely to be censored than other terms, it is difficult to ascertain the extent of the filtering that Microsoft undertakes.

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