Monday, October 22, 2007

Censorship plot thickens

Theories on why China decided to block YouTube focused on last week's Communist Party Congress in Beijing and the fact that YouTube launched a Taiwanese version of its site on Thursday.
Now though, there are suggestions that the government was 'shielding' the public from images of George Bush feting the Dalai Lama in Washington. Have you seen the Dalai Lama? He's the most inoffensive old geezer you could imagine. All he does is smile and talk about peace. Subversive bastard.
And it appears YouTube was not the only victim. Users of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines all founds themselves directed to the Chinese site Baidu.
The theory goes that popular sites were disrupted to force the public to consume news from official State media rather than see what the world was saying about the Dalai Lama and/or the Party Congress and/or YouTube's implicit acknowledgment of Taiwan as a separate entity to mainland China.
Add to this the fact the BBC News and Wikipedia remain off limits and it's not exactly a picture of a 21st century superpower.
Of course the authorities never comment - or even admit - to censoring the media, and researching censorship is a tricky business. The Party don't see the irony in blocking websites that refer to its habit of censoring anything it views as sensitive.
On the upside, Blogspot has been inexplicably unlocked so bloggers can get the word out of China - even if it's not as easy for information to get in.

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