Censorship Central

Take that, Chairman Mao!

Some of you might have seen this article already, but the Chinese government announced last week that they were requiring all personal websites and blogs based in China to register so that their content could be monitored and censored for sensitive political content. Some of you may be thinking, "yeah right, how can they possibly censor all blogs and personal websites- there are millions of them!"

Answer: they can do it by employing thousands and thousands of people to do nothing but browse such sites, all day long (and by designing a net-crawling program that searches sites for a registration code)! Internet censorship, as you can imagine, is becoming increasingly important for stifling the thousands of radical ideas that are spread via the world wide web. I mean, try to imagine our country without freedom of expression on the internet! How would we ever discuss important social issues such as whether Brad and Angelina are really just good friends, whether Michael Jackson used "jesus juice" to take advantage of Bubbles, or how one goes about enhancing the size of their mammary glands using natural herbal pills? I'm not sure the impact that this will have on Ruined For Life if Corrie and I do move to China, but when the time comes, don't believe any of my blogs that start with, "Chairman Mao is 'da bomb." Here are some excerpts from the article, which can be read in full here.

Update 6/13: I just found another article today, detailing how Microsoft is cooperating with the effort, restricting certain words such as "democracy" and "human rights" from being posted in blogs using their web portal. Read it here.

SHANGHAI, China - Authorities have ordered all China-based Web sites and blogs to register or be closed down, in the latest effort by the communist government to police the world of cyberspace.

Commercial publishers and advertisers can face fines of up to 1 million yuan ($120,000) for failing to register, according to documents posted on the Web site of the Ministry of Information Industry.

Private, noncommercial bloggers or Web sites must register the complete identity of the person responsible for the site, it said. The ministry, which has set a June 30 deadline for compliance, said 74 percent of all sites had already registered.

"The Internet has profited many people but it also has brought many problems, such as sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously poisoned people's spirits," the MII Web site said in explaining the rules, which were quietly introduced in March.

All public media in China is controlled by the state, though limits on the Internet have tended to lag behind as advances in technology and the Web's rapid spread outstripped Beijing's ability to keep tabs on users and service providers.

China has more than 87 million Internet users, the world's second largest online population after the United States...read the rest here.