Since July this year, the crackdown in Chinese cyberspace has been widely reported. Here is the latest example. SINA.com is China’s largest news portal and blog hosting service. Like every other blog hosting service in China, SINA hires human censors and uses key-word filtering technologies to censor blog posts on its servers. The bloggers on sina.com often receive messages like the one below to inform them that their posts have been deleted by the SINA “System Administrator”
“Sorry. Your post ‘Ôº∏Ôº∏Ôº∏Ôº∏Ôº∏’ has been deleted by the System Administrator. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have questions, please email us and we will get back to you within 24 hours. ”
However, some bloggers on SINA.com have found themselves under much tighter censorship recently. When their posts are deleted, they also receive an additional text from the “System Administrator.” Here is an example:
“Sorry. Your post ‘The Internet Monitors are becoming Internet Bastards’ has been deleted by the System Administrator. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have questions, please email us and we will get back to you within 24 hours.
Number 33721 user, please pay attention. You have violated the Regulation on Internet Security and Management of the People’s Republic of China. Your IP is under surveillance now. Please do not publish such posts which contains reactionary or anti-China content. Otherwise, we will work with China Internet Monitoring agencies to adopt unconventional measures.”
Talk about a digital panopticon!
