Thursday, February 17, 2011

Censorship of the Internet in China

Out of the top 100 sites on the internet, 12 are currently blocked in the mainland of China (wiki). Blocked sites include imdb, youtube, twitter, blogspot (i think i've heard of this one), facebook, imageshack, and various others that would not be appropriate to name to all you frumsters out there, even though im sure most would never dream of exploring such vulgar sites. Additionally, such searches as "democracy" on google pull up a censored page. How they censor is a whole other issue. You don't end up at a page declaring THIS WEBSITE IS CENSORED BY THE PEOPLES REPUBLIC OF CHINA. No, instead you are brought to a "this website does not exsist" or "your search query did not match any records."  Because of such techniques, it is very possible that many people living in china do not even know that content is being censored. Though I suspect that the knowledge of the censorship is making its way through the population, and has been for years, since i havn't looked into it though, this is purely speculative.

2 comments:

  1. What is interesting is that not only does the Chinese government censor the internet, there are also reports of them hacking into other websites to gather sensitive information. So much for the internet knocking down barriers.

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  2. Wow, I guess China is in need of some serious watchdog journalism. Because they don't know what they don't know.

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