Twitter touched off a torrent of criticism after announcing last week it can remove messages from the online service–known as tweets–within specific countries if asked to do so. Monday, Mr. Costolo said the policy was designed for the company to exist in certain countries, not as a means of censorship ….

The company is just trying to handle the situation in “the most honest, transparent and forward-looking way,” he said. “You can’t reside in countries and not operate within the law.”

The announced policy is not meant as a means for the company to get into countries where it currently isn’t, such as China or Iran. “I don’t think the current environment in China is one in which we can operate,” Mr. Costolo said.

On the WSJ’s Digits blog, Twitter’s chief lawyer reiterated this, pointing out that the tweet-blocking system would be unlikely to satisfy Beijing in any case:

Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said in an interview on Friday that the announcement wasn’t a “policy change.” Twitter’s “philosophy is still the same” about wanting to protect free speech on the Web as much as possible, he said ….

Macgillivray didn’t delve into what Twitter would or wouldn’t agree to censor in different countries but said the announcement “has nothing to do with China,” where the company’s service has been blocked. He added that authorities there likely wouldn’t care much about Twitter’s system because the company doesn’t filter content before it is posted; rather, it responds to requests to remove tweets after users have posted them.

(Although Sina Weibo does remove published posts, it does so without legal review and as part of a broader arsenal of harmonisation techniques.)

When asked whether Twitter would ever consider proactively filtering content before it is posted based on standing government requests in some countries, like China, Macgillivray said that while it’s “hard to say ‘ever,’ I don’t see how we could do it.”

For more on Costolo’s conference appearance, see Wired and The Verge. TPM obtained more details on how Twitter’s blocking will work. See also criticism of the “birdbrained” new policy from Foreign Policy, and support from the Center for Democracy & Technology, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail and social media blog Mashable.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Global Times, Iran, microblogs, online censorship, Twitter
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Summary: On August 27 of this year, Pizhou municipal education bureau sent a red-lettered document [i.e., important directive] to all secondary and private schools. The document states that since last year, Pizhou city has already had 3 teachers detained for disseminating falsehoods online. All teachers [were instructed] to “pay attention to forms, speak about governance, speak about the present situation, refrain from doing things that are not to be done, and from irresponsibly remarking on things which ought not to be remarked upon.” This incident has been dubbed as “restricted Web gate” by netizens. The authenticity of the document was confirmed on the 13th by Pizhou municipal education bureau director Gao Fuxin.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Jiangsu, online censorship
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To illustrate the power of blogging, Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism and director of the China Internet Project, cited the collapse of schools during last year’s 7.9-magnitude earthquake in the province of Sichuan — the result, he said, of the “deep corruption” of the Chinese government.

Qiang recounted how a lone blogger — an artist and architect who helped design China’s Olympic stadium — began collecting and publishing the names of thousands of students who had been killed as the region’s substandard schools crumbled. When Chinese censors deleted the postings, the lists were picked up by other bloggers, until the authorities had little option but to publish official lists of the victims.

“From an individual act, an inter?national event,” said Qiang, adding that the story illustrates “the first law of Chinese cyberspace: Censorship meets resistance.”

Actually, my original statement was:

The first law of Chinese cyberpolitics is “Where there are River Crabs, there are Grass-Mud Horses (?????????????).” According to this “Law of the Grass-Mud Horse,” online censorship always meets resistance.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, grass-mud horse, online censorship, river crabs, School Collapse, Xiao Qiang
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Chinese authorities have shut down 162 Web sites that had been found providing pornographic and “lewd” content in their audio or video segments, according to a statement released by the country’s online watchdog Monday.

The blocked Web sites had not acquired permits to broadcast audio and video programs issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), said a statement issued by the Special Operation Office for Crackdown on online Porn and Lewd Content.

The Web sites include www.baigujing.com, www.bt990.com and other sites mainly based in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong Provinces.

© dwang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-vulgarity campaign, online censorship
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As the internet has grown rapidly in China in recent years, there has been an attendant upsurge in cases where ordinary citizens (??), or “netizens” (??), are arrested, jailed or otherwise punished for things they dared to write. The latest case to have Web users up in arms involves the alleged sacking of a substitute professor at Hubei University for Nationalities after the teacher wrote an entry on his personal weblog criticizing the school’s anniversary celebrations.

The case, involving 50 year-old teacher Guo Guanglin (???), has drawn a flurry of coverage in the commercial media over the last week, and it has once again resurrected that age-old term denoting the violent repression of speech — “to incur guilt by one’s words,” or wenziyu (???).

“To incur guilt by one’s words” is now an increasingly popular buzzword denoting official action taken against ordinary citizens who speak their minds in spaces — like blogs, chatrooms and SMS messages — where the line between the personal and the public is blurred. But the term can also be used to point generally to more egregious examples of censorship.

A related and more direct phrase in Chinese is “incurring guilt by one’s words,” or yin yan huo zui (????).

Read more about how netizens create their own language in the face of online censorship and netizens’ voices on CDT.

© jleung for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: academic censorship, blogs, Guo Guanglin, Internet censorship, online censorship, online culture, teachers
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The Chinese government, which spent months mulling over ways to crack down on bloggers, is retreating from its campaign, a development that illustrates the difficulty China faces as it tries to control technology.

Since September, the central government has been deliberating the need to enforce a real-name registration system, which would have required nearly 20 million Chinese bloggers to register their real identities on the Web and give up the anonymity many have gotten used to, even though bloggers can never be entirely anonymous as they can be traced back to an IP address.

(...)
Read the rest of Why China Relaxed Blogger Crackdown – Jason Leow (90 words)

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bloggers, online censorship, real name registration
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“MySpace, which already has more than 100 million users worldwide, is backed by News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media groups. The company formally announced MySpace China yesterday, and the site went live shortly after midnight in China, with a layout which mimics that of its main global site – with a few key differences.

Discussion forums on subjects like religion and politics are nowhere to be found on the new Chinese MySpace site, even though these are popular topics on other international MySpace sites. Instead, users are only offered safer topics for conversation, such as humor, sport and movies.

Users are told to click a button if they spot any ‘misconduct’ by other users. This ‘misconduct’ includes actions such as ‘endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order’ – according to the site’s terms and conditions.”[Full Text]

© Eric Kaltman for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: MySpace, online censorship
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