Yahoo China has the Worst Filtering Policy 184
rmunaval writes "Reporters Without Borders has an article on search-result censorship in China by different companies. The conclusion was made based on six politically sensitive keywords. A search on yahoo.cn resulted in 97% pro-Beijing results compared to 83% on google.cn and 78% on msn.cn." From the article: "[Yahoo!] is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or 'Tibet independence', temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond."
On the third try... (Score:3, Insightful)
Blocking Is Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
how long will it be before they tire of this game? (Score:5, Insightful)
So much for freedom on the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Olympics (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
To the point however, it's funny that all of this happens only due to the world's largest communist country accepting certain capitalist ideas. What i'm saying, is that if it wasn't due to the money factor then this wouldn't be happening, and the search engines of the world might (effectively even perhaps) force China to change some of their policies a bit. However, since money IS the issue (which for some reason in reading Marx/Engles I thought that money wasn't supposed to be controlling in Communisim) then the people are being censored.
Were I a company, I'd just say "Fuck you" to China.
Methodology (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
This seems like a rather simplistic analysis to me. Are most Chinese citizens going to use such obvious terms to search for information about topics they know the government is attempting to block? My understanding of how Chinese citizens use the Internet is limited, so I'm likely off base. It just seems to me that most Chinese users of Yahoo would be gathering information using terms less likely to be aggressively filtered. A broader comparison might be more useful in determining just how aggressively each engine is filtering results.
Re:'Worst' Filtering policy (Score:4, Insightful)
The government in China deliberately doesn't specify exactly what is illegal. It's far more effective for ISPs, newspapers, tv producers to overcompensate in censoring themselves knowing that failing to do so will likely lead to their imprisonment or execution.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps a Chinese person could come to the conclusion that the US government is censoring information about the civil rights movement, because when "Lincoln Memorial" is typed into google.com, there is no mention of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in the top results.
Re:Olympics (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is that they'll set up unfiltered internet cafes in Olympic venues that are only for access by Olympic staff, athletes, and foreign visitors . They'll keep Chinese nationals out of them. It wouldn't be all that difficult for a communist government to restrict access, especially considering the security that Olympic venues typically have.
Re:Olympics (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Look behind the headlines (Score:1, Insightful)
If something isn't done soon, we (as American's) will have to turn to Russia or Cuba for help with our oppresive regime.
Don't be blind to what is happening in your own backyard.
--PEACE!
Re:Look behind the headlines (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't be blind to what is happening in your own pants.
Re:On the third try... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or they could simply allow the search.
Re:Look behind the headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Look behind the headlines (Score:3, Insightful)
You'll never see a corporation sacrifice its life for the greater good. Put up its very existence in front of a military battle tank simply to make a point that death is better than life as a slave. Corporations feel no remorse and no shame. CEO's are bound by law to seek maximum profits and put their personal feelings aside.
That so many people are dumbed into thinking corporations have HUMAN RIGHTS is utterly appalling.
By aiding and abetting the continuance of the Chinese Communist Party, Yahoo as an organization is just as condemnable as the communist party of China is. Its shareholders are as members of the Chinese Communist Party, all jointly responsible for the human rights violations taking place there. Doesn't Yahoo seek the exact same thing the Chinese Communist Party seeks? (POWER)
If Yahoo wants to help the people of China break free of bondage, then why does it try to blind them to the truth which the communist party so desperately wants to hide?
Which one is worse? The executives at YAHOO know what freedom feels like. At least some of the Chinese Communist Party members have been oppressed for so long they may genuinely believe that absolute supression of individual human rights to the state is justifiable.
This post is not merely directed at YAHOO but at the very institution of the corporation itself.
Unless a corporation has embedded human rights in its shareholder agreement (have any as of this date?) then it is legally bound to treat human rights as nothing more than a Public relations matter. Whatever a corporation says about CARING about anything. Don't buy it for a second. It isn't legally permitted to CARE about anything except self-interest (and anything else the shareholders agree to in the shareholder agreement).
Law, but not legitimate law. (Score:4, Insightful)
To follow your line of reasoning would be to say that I.G. Farben did nothing wrong when it churned out Zyklon-B, because it was following a "legitimate law" of the government in power at the time. Following a law because you have no other choice, and a gun is being held to your head (figuratively or otherwise), is one thing; calling that sort of rule "legitimate" is quite another. (And don't start whining to me about Godwin's Law, this is a completely apt comparison in this situation. Both governments have roughly the same claim to legitimacy.)
I can excuse companies for falling in line with the Chinese regime because they have no choice but to do so, as long as they admit this is why they're doing it. (I will even accept, if not excuse, a company which stands up and says that they are cooperating with injustice because it is profitable to do so, and doesn't delude itself into thinking it's doing good.) Giving the government a claim to legitimacy is far more damaging, and in my mind inexcusable.
Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as there exists no unified effort to isolate China, the idea that a company should unilaterally boycott China is a nice thought, but toothless.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
That sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Probably the closest equivalent to Tiananmen Square in the U.S. would be Kent State, and when I type that into google I get refrences to the university but many more to the shootings. Searching "google images" for Kent State gives lots of pictures of the incident.
Very familiar; give it a rest. (Score:3, Insightful)
I admit, I've engaged in some karma-whore Bush-bashing from time to time as well. He's an easy target, and a lot of the stuff that's gone on recently is easy fodder for tinfoil-hat comparisons. But to seriously compare anything that's going on right now to the Chinese under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Russia under Stalin, or Germany under Hitler, is not only to show your own ignorance and lack of appreciation of scale and perspective, but also to do a disservice to those historical events, by comparing them to something that's quite frankly so trivial in relative impact and suffering.
If you wanted to compare what's going on today to the chilling effect during the 50's Red Scare, or something of similar scale internationally, then I would agree with you that such a comparison is probably apt, or at least closer to being apt than U.S. v. China/Germany/USSR/etc. comparisons are.
Drawing parallels between the U.S. today and actual fascist (whether leftist or rightist) regimes are nothing more than a cheap shot, and intellectually dishonest.
Six Keywrods? (Score:1, Insightful)
Now if it was 600, or 6000, keywords I may actually believe it, at least a little.
Re:On the third try... (Score:3, Insightful)
But would that not imply that the other search engines are getting around the firewall?
If the firewall is so effective, why would China have asked Google to impliment a search filter that's inferior to existing methods?
Re:Capitalism of the Communists allows censorship (Score:2, Insightful)
If they're not willing to stand up for themselves and "throw off the yoke of their oppressors" then they deserve it. All people have the government they deserve. We Americans will start to find that out in the next few years.
Re:Very familiar; give it a rest. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Worst Filtering Policy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, when you actually know something about the incident, it becomes very tiring listening to people parroting it in the west. What western power has not done something similar at some point or another? For example, in my parent's generation, the My Lai incident in Vietnam was a major, major deal, and yet most people in my generation probably have no idea what it is. Similarly, in my US World History class the 27 million soviet soldiers who gave their lives opposing Hitler were not even mentioned -- the only reason I even knew about them is because my German grandfather had first hand experience running from them, and yet somehow I was taught that the US and the UK did all the heavy lifting in the European theatre.
Other examples abound. Up until very recently, the Taiwanese government had an extremely active censor on the 228 incident, refering to a massacre that occurred on February 28th, 1947, in which the Guomindang essentially murdered between 10,000 and 30,000 people, depending on whose estimates you believe. The Tiananmen Square incident occurred much more recently -- in 1989 -- and the government already admits that it was "a mistake" (I live in China). The 228 incident was buried by the Taiwanese for more than 40 years (it is now a national holiday on Taiwan.)
The Japanese refuse, for reasons of face, to own up to the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst afronts to human decency the world has ever seen, and many Japanese I've spoken to have never heard of it, or if they have, are not aware of the implications. The Japanese government refuses to allow its inclusion in Japanese history books used for education, and the current Japanese PM makes frequent visits to the Yakusuni shrine, where he pays his respects to the convicted war criminals who were responsible for the Rape and many other similar atrocities.
There's the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British military gunned down 400 peaceful indian protestors, many of them women and children, who were sitting in a walled enclosure and had no means to escape the guns. At this point we're going back a ways in history, but how many British kids are fully aware of the implications of this incident?
It's also a little bit frustrating to hear the Tiananmen Square incident portrayed as a pro-democracy movement when that was really only part of it. It was, in fact, a relatively disorganized gathering of people with wildly different goals. Gorbachev was visting Beijing at the time, and for those of you that remember the timeframe this was around the time that he was pushing Perestroika in the USSR (judged by essentially everyone except some Americans to be a catastrophic failure in the long run.) The faction of students protesting the government were pushing for more transparency and more reforms, including but not limited to democratic and economic reforms. But they weren't the only ones there, nor were they the only ones murdered -- but because the other group (comprising roughly half of the people present) were not pro-democracy agitators, they are never mentioned in the west (their deaths, presumably, are not important.)
The other half were anti-reformists, primarily workers who had enjoyed good and stable conditions under pork barrell socialism and who were suffering under Deng Xiao Ping's economic reforms, as they were unable to compete in an increasingly deregulated market place (similar to the anti-globalisation wonks we have nowadays.) They wanted a return to pre-1980s Maoist China! Can you believe it?
How could these two wildly seperate groups get along, given that they had such completely different aims (more reforms, versus less?) The answer is simply that they appealed to nationalistic fervor. They got together and sang the Inte