China holds drill to shut down 'harmful' websites

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-40830048

by scaryclam • 9 years ago

57 75 9 years ago

bbc.co.uk

itg• 9 years ago

In the west, its the corporations that decide what content is considered "harmful" and remove it. Ex: youtube, patreon, twitter, etc.

eterm• 9 years ago

Yes but that's irrelevant for this article. You're trying to move the discussion away from the authoritarianism of the Chinese government and distract by discussing Western corporations.

CaptSpify• 9 years ago

I'd disagree. I find it relevant. Both countries are censoring, but use different means to achieve that. It's a global problem that needs a global solution.

mfoy_3• 9 years ago

There's a tremendous difference between private companies deciding what to do with their own platforms, and the government dictating what all companies must do with their platforms.

SomeStupidPoint2• 9 years ago

What do you feel that difference to be?

davidreiss2• 9 years ago

Does that argument fly anymore when corporations are so much more powerful than most nations?

FB and google both have a larger population than china. Censorship by FB or Google is far more harmful/effective than whatever the chinese government does.

Also, would we support corporations right to censor if they were censoring content we disagreed with? Imagine if FB/Youtube/Verizon/etc started censoring lgbt content. Would we still use the "private companies" can do whatever they want argument?

Given how powerful many companies are ( especially monopolistic companies like FB/GOOG ) maybe it's time corporations are required to protect free speech like corporations are required to protect the rights of minorities/disabled/etc.

5trokerac3• 9 years ago

It's not tremendous at all. If a PAC gives millions to a social network to minimize opposition viewpoints, then there isn't much difference at all with what China is doing. The only variance is economic.

vetinari3• 9 years ago

Really, is there?

I was born in a communist country and when I was a kid, there was a joke:

In the socialistic countries, the government owns the businesses. In capitalist countries, it's the other way around.

Think about it a little, and then apply your argument again.

StreamBright2• 9 years ago

Imagine a scenario if Facebook decides to censor content based on their political stance. That potentially impacts 2B people. The worst case impact of Chinese censoring 1.4B. Again, I am comparing worst cases, I know.

And as we know Facebook was actively doing exactly that.

http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...

gozur884• 9 years ago

Not as much as you'd think. Companies like Google and Facebook have government contracts and even if they didn't it would be trivially easy for the administrative state to attack them with tax or anti-trust law.

They'll do what the government wants them to do, as long as it doesn't threaten the bottom line.

mmierz2• 9 years ago

Any forum that doesn't censor at least some content is abused until it either starts censoring or becomes unusable.

The key difference is that you're allowed to make your own platform and set whatever rules you like

DINKDINK2• 9 years ago

What about shadow regulation where government regulators censor information they legally cannot censor for 1st amendment issues but de facto can by increasing their regulatory levers on companies to stand up to state level censorship

zaro• 9 years ago

The key difference is that you're allowed to make your own platform and set whatever rules you like

But can you really? What if suddenly Google decides your platform is producing fake news?

DanBC2• 9 years ago

Try making a death threat against POTUS.

Rmilb• 9 years ago

I think we can all assume that threats of violence and bodily harm are not and should not be covered by the 1st amendment. Only using the US eccentric amendment as an example.

nsaslideface• 9 years ago

It is a bad trend, and thoughtful American writers like Glenn Greenwald have written strongly against it. But the idea a government censoring the internet is a more extreme, less arguable perversion of human cooperation...

user9823• 9 years ago

Are UK journalists still gagged under threat of imprisonment[1] from reporting on the memo where Bush and Blair discussed bombing Al Jazeera?[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor–Keogh_official_secr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_bombing_memo

PhasmaFelis• 9 years ago

Show me a website with more than a thousand or so regular users and absolutely no content moderation, and I'll show you a horrible cesspit.

api• 9 years ago

These are private sites. That's not censorship. Use a competitor or create your own site if you don't like their policies. Current cloud pricing makes hosting a pretty high volume site cost less than 25 dollars a month.

am19887• 9 years ago

If you don't like it then use a different site. Corporate entities have zero obligation to allow you to use their platform for whatever you want.

lettergram• 9 years ago

A document circulating online and attributed to a cyber police unit said the drill had been held "in order to step up online security for the 19th Party Congress and tackle the problem of smaller websites illegally disseminating harmful information"

If true, the Chinese government isn't even pretending this information is "fake" or "untrue", but instead they just find "harmful".

mfoy_3• 9 years ago

I may be wrong, but I don't think they have historically claimed that, generally speaking... they've censored all manner of content that they simply don't like and been pretty unabashed about it. I mean, they may have claimed that certain events didn't happen but that's only tangentially related to their Internet censorship policies.

wu-ikkyu3• 9 years ago

It's important to consider the difficulties in translating Mandarin to English.

anovikov• 9 years ago

Probably true. It is hard even with case of Russian. For example, we have 2 words for 'truth', and they have very different meaning. Same for corruption. Language is an instrument of doublethink.

allemagne• 9 years ago

Considering true information as "harmful" is perfectly normal in Western societies as well (in certain contexts). The U.S. government response to leaks from Chelsea Manning, Snowden, and the leaks flowing right now from the current administration have been similar: "The REAL problem is how damaging this leak is!"

I don't mean to imply that it's an acceptable thing to think, or that the U.S. is as authoritarian as China (it's not by an order of magnitude), but contextualizing this makes it seem less surprising. If we're more alarmed, we should have been this alarmed to begin with. This is the party that spearheaded the Cultural Revolution and erected the Great Firewall... this kind of behavior is very par for the course.

LeifCarrotson• 9 years ago

There's a difference between being harmful to an administrative agenda, and harmful to people.

It's one thing to publish a leak detailing corruption which "harms" the agenda and reputation of the criminals engaged in it. Boo on them. "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."

It's another to publish a leak that reveals identities and plans made in secret, and gets people killed.

Somewhere in the middle are leaks like yesterday's transcripts of Trump talking to Australia and Mexico: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/austra... Perhaps world leaders should be able to speak together confidentially, and perhaps these transcripts will 'harm' people in the future when politicians are less able to communicate frankly because the conversations are public.

am19887• 9 years ago

The press still publishes the information and the government generally doesn't get to censor it.

The government is free to try and stop leaks. That's not the same thing as censorship.

The level of secrecy a government operates under is a massive issue, but it's not the same one.

this kind of behavior is very par for the course.

That doesn't mean we should normalize it.

closeparen• 9 years ago

The government made no serious attempt to censor the contents of leaks once leaked. Once the papers get their hands on something, it becomes public. The "censorship" activity here is to identify, punish, and deter people in positions of privileged access to "black" information who transfer it to the public domain, not people in the "clear" world who repeat that information.

user9823• 9 years ago

It's amusing to read the alarmism in this article, on bbc.co.uk, while keeping in mind that the UK already filters, surveils, and blocks websites nationwide and has statutes to censor sites that advocate against the monarchy or "imagine the death" of the queen.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...

pertymcpert3• 9 years ago

What's your point? Should the BBC which is an independent news organisation just not publish this article?

msla4• 9 years ago

Independent as in funded by taxes the government collects.

Independence from your source of income is truly impressive. I doubt any other news organ manages it.

plandis• 9 years ago

I'm curious -- are you a Chinese national? I feel like I keep seeing userXYZ's posting pro-China whataboutism every chance possible.

user9823• 9 years ago

In 446 days I've made posts in 3 China-related threads, total. Including this one.

dnh443• 9 years ago

I really don't think using rhetoric like "whataboutism" as a distraction when someone points out some sort of hypocrisy promotes conversation in any useful way.

bowmessage• 9 years ago

What is the Chinese state going to do about the 'harmful' information that is encoded in various blockchains, Bitcoin's[1] being one example?

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4k73w/someone-pu...

DINKDINK2• 9 years ago

What You See Is All There Is

If the lion share of people can't see it, it doesn't exist.

China holds drill to shut down 'harmful' websites

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