Censorship And Free Press

The Modern Classic Reader Society honored a number of the gay novels that have been state censored or ostracized by the publiic and those of succeeding writers inspired by them.   It also honored G. Roger Denson’s novel Voice of Force as its 2009 pick, a story about an openly gay writer who finds that, when his friendship with a straight opera tenor ends with the tenor’s murder, his writing is indicted by the media as symptomatic of his predation of heterosexual men and is used in his trial as evidence of his homicidal nature. Here is the synopsis from the back cover of ... Read Full Story

According to the New York Times, "The Grass-Mud Horse" is a mythical creature whose name in Chinese sounds like "fuck your mother". These horses face a problem: invading river crabs that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, river crab sounds very much like harmony, which in Chinas cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been harmonized — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintaos regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society. While grass-mud horse sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese, its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its meaning —taken ... Read Full Story

Great Firewall of China I was very intrigued to stumble upon this web service which offers bloggers and web developers a tool for determining if their site's url is blocked by the censors employed by the Chinese Communist Party in an effort to control the information made available to its country's citizens via the internet. I have two primary blogs on which I write frequently about issues of international politics, economics and globalization more generally. This is one of those blogs, and as you can see, it is entirely devoted to my thought and evaluation of all things Chinese. Naturally, I take great pleasure ... Read Full Story

As I post this, I was also sent a warning letter that I will be next. --- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press Release – Feb 10, 2009 – We believe that filmmaker-activist Luis Moro, administrator for End the US Trade Embargo on Cuba group was censored by Facebook for giving information out, or supplying information in detail about how people can help to pass the bill to allow travel between the United States and Cuba by deleting his account without warning.  Los Angeles, Feb 10 / Moro Films LLC has released a statement to the press about what Luis Moro believes is a direct infringement ... Read Full Story

Image via CrunchBase Mapping China and the law I found this posting from the Ogle Earth weblog, a Google Earth development community, particularly interesting. I am not surprised that the CCP has grown wary of companies such as Google, whose stated goal is to undermine suppression of individual freedom, and I used to believe that Google would never succumb to the pressures that be when pressed about their sensitive technologies. However, I have been very disappointed in the company since they decided to comply with Chinese censorship guidelines for their blogs and search results.  For the companies executives and founders to seriously claim that ... Read Full Story

In this series, I examine the possibility of limiting certain kinds of speech , and especially the possibility of legal limits. As stated in the introductory post in this series , such limits are possible but should be exceptional given the importance of the freedom of speech. So far, I have looked at two examples: holocaust denial and hate speech . In both cases, I believe that legal limitations are acceptable and even necessary in certain cases or circumstances, but I also pointed out the dangers of such limitations. This post deals with another case, namely so-called derogatory speech , a form of speech ... Read Full Story

HONG KONG —- China's 47 million bloggers are frequently subjected to censorship by their Internet service providers, but politically sensitive material also routinely falls through the cracks as individual companies interpret government guidelines in their own way, a new report shows. In the first in-depth report to focus on user-generated content on social media and blogging platforms, researchers found that censorship levels across 15 different Chinese blogging platforms varied even more than expected. The report, titled "China's Censorship 2.0: How Chinese Companies Censor Bloggers," also says "a great deal of politically sensitive material survives in the Chinese blogosphere, and chances for survival can likely ... Read Full Story