Censorship And Free Press

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

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

Notice the difference between the two ads? Demi Moore’s cleavage and knees are covered with black ink under the Iranian regulations. During a discussion in my English seminar at school we debated over censorship. From The Chronicles of Narnia and Of Mice and Men , many novels treasured by people all over the world get censored all the time. However, books aren’t the only things censored in our society; all sorts of things are censored including music, television, movies, maps, and even education. It took me a while to finally realize that fashion has been censored in so many ways. There have been many ... Read Full Story

One of the first things I did after moving to San Francisco six years ago was go onto Yelp.com to check out the reviews of my surroundings. I looked up reviews on local restaurants, doctors, supermarkets, hair stylists, stores and tourist attractions. I can remember that I needed to see a dentist and was so new to the city that I had no one to ask. I looked at the reviews on Yelp and chose one that was in my area. I connected with what people were saying about the "gentle dentist." After I went to my dentist appointment, I wasn't disappointed and was ... Read Full Story