Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Censoring the News about Censoring

It would appear that comments that support Google's departure from China or critical of China's government censorship are being deleted from the Internet. Totally predictable.

chinaSMACK (translates posts on Chinese BBS sites)
Yesterday morning, Google announced that they have closed google.cn and are forwarding users to google.com.hk. This is of course big news but the news has been very carefully controlled.

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Many Chinese netizen comments have been deleted or hidden and most comments that remain visible clearly support the government or are critical of Google. You can see this in the translated comments from NetEase above.

On KDS, a popular Shanghai BBS discussion forum, I was able to find some comments in support of Google or critical of the government before they were deleted. KDS moderators first deleted posts with many replies before deleting the smaller posts with fewer replies. Many posts were deleted while I was still collecting comments from them.

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It is important to say that many comments (before they were deleted) that support Google did not support Google’s decision to leave China. Many Chinese netizens disagree with the government’s censorship but do not agree with Google’s actions and feel that Google leaving China is a very regrettable outcome.

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