Blogs in China: Free and Open They're Not

There are an estimated 300,000 blogs in China, with thousands being added daily. The government is stepping up efforts to control their content. The OpenNet Initiative — a partnership of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge — conducted a revealing experiment into Chinese blog filtering:

Over the last year, the Chinese government has focused increasing attention on the control of blogs. Three popular domestic blog providers in China were temporarily shutdown in March 2004. The websites of the three blog providers, blogcn.com, blogbus.com and blogdriver.com, were not filtered or blocked through technical means, rather they were closed down. The home pages of each of the sites carried a message indicating that their services were temporarily suspended ... Although the blog providers have been re-opened, all three have implemented a filtering mechanism to control the content of blog posts.

....Since China does not publicize its list of banned keywords, we use the QQ list as a representative sample of the type of topic areas the government may be targeting for filtering on blogs.

We created blog entries of all 987 keywords to each blog service and identified the individual keywords that triggered filtering mechanisms built in to the blog software. Two of the Chinese blog providers prevented the creation of entries that contained these keywords while one censored the entry by replacing the offending words with "*" characters.

....While Blogbus and Blogcn filter 18 of the 987 and 19 of the 987 keywords, Blogdriver filters 350 of the 987 keywords tested. The filtered keywords generally fall into five categories:

National minorities' independence movements: the well known Tibetan cause is represented as well as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. The inclusion of some Taiwanese politicians' names also fall into this category as they are all people who are known to support Taiwan independence.

Continued on the next page Page 1 — Page 2

Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and publisher of Blogcritics.org, which, quite frankly, rules - as do his wife and four children.

Visit Eric Olsen's author page — Eric Olsen's Blog