Friday, July 29, 2016

Chinese Censorship at Facebook

I recommend anyone interested in Chinese censorship read Li Yuan's article in the Wall Street Journal toady.  [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/weibo-navigates-brave-new-world-1469639981 ].  This article shows the transformation of Wiebo from a Facebook look-a-like to an e-commerce site mostly because it could not sustain the central government's incessant clampdown on content - basically anything the criticized the government policies.  The examples in this article are worth reading because they show how censorship and control of the Internet play together against particular individuals, and how that drove Wiebo into another business line.

It is not something we want to see here in the US. But, Facebook got a little close to censorship when it "accidently" cut off the Democratic National Committee emails posted on Wikileaks.  It is no secret which candidate the Facebook empire supports, but that kind of support does not include censorship of its own making.

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