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Thursday, January 05, 2006

It could happen to you

Rebecca MacKinnon has the skinny on MSN Spaces's blocking of a dissident Chinese blogger's site.

Microsoft’s MSN Spaces continues to censor its Chinese language
blogs, and has become more aggressive and thorough at censorship since I first checked out MSN’s censorship system last summer.
On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao
Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his
blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. (You can see the Google cache of his blog up until Dec.22nd here.)
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.

Read the whole story here, along with recent updates.

Link via Neha, who also says this:

I think it's crucial to remember that this just isn't about living in oppressive regimes. You may choose to ignore this issue because you live in a country with relatively more freedom, or you think you are outside the purview of censorship because you write about horticulture or compare knitting patterns. You probably aren't.

Blogged for thee by @ 4:13 am | 1 Comments | Post a Comment | Link Love? |

1 Noble Readers have commented.

On Thu Jan 05, 09:09:00 am GMT+05:30, the Hon'ble Karthik said...: See this

"So there you have it. China objects to the language name Dzongkha because of an imaginary association with the leader of the legitimate government of its Tibetan colony. In order to please China, Microsoft refuses to use the generally accepted name for the national language of Bhutan. Now there's a company with principles."


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