Truth Collective

Iran was on its way to establishing itself as an open democracy as well as a country that allowed its people to speak out (in some sense) and communicate freely (at least, far more than our friends in China), but recent moves by its government have thrown up great barriers in communication. The people have been stifled and what limited sense of expression they were allowed is being stripped away. There’s only so much they can do to stand up for themselves within their own borders without revolution; so people across the globe have been standing up for the rights of the Iranian people to communicate freely, but it seems this help isn’t without persecution: apparently a man in Ohio was attacked for providing proxies to Iranians to allow them to twitter.

This is a battle for freedom of communication in an age built almost entirely on communication. Reach out to the people of Iran, no matter your religious viewpoint, no matter the history of the country; its people deserve uncensored communication as much as anyone else.

From NYT:

China’s government censors have begun to block access to the Internet services Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Microsoft’s live.com, broadening an already extraordinary effort to shield its citizens from any hint of Thursday’s 20th anniversary of the military crackdown that ended the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

People in China who tried to gain access to the blocked Web sites on Tuesday instead encountered an error message saying the sites’ servers had unexpectedly dropped the Internet connection — a standard indicator that access has been blocked.

Weeks earlier, censors blocked Chinese users from viewing all videos on YouTube, and in recent days some television viewers have reported that BBC World News reports related to the Tiananmen anniversary were being selectively blacked out of broadcast programs.

The concept of censoring the internet just seems ridiculous. Notably, China has also blocked some blogging websites including blogspot and wordpress, which leads me to believe that some Chinese internet nerds (aka “netizens”) are going through some serious withdrawal right now. Thanks to my friend Wanning for the heads up about this one.

This infamous photograph of the “Tank Man,” taken on June 5th, 1989, has become a universally recognized symbol of the everyman’s resistance against a totalitarian, militarized regime… well, almost. A quick search of “Tiananmen Square” on Google images yields thousands of images of the Tank Man. However, the same search conducted in China would yield only state-sanctioned photographs of the Square, as internet censorship by the state has erased the tragic events of the Tiananmen Square massacre from the collective memory of the people. Young people at the forefront of China’s technological and economic revolution, even those who are students at China’s prestigious Peking University (which led the pro-democracy movement in 1989 Beijing), have virtually no understanding of the significance of this image.
The PBS documentary “The Tank Man” (click here to watch the full program) is a must-see for anyone living in our global age, as it is directly relevant to the emergence of the Chinese state as a world superpower and the issue of information control through internet censorship. The documentary touches upon the history of the Tiananmen Square events from the viewpoints of various journalists, scholars, and eyewitnesses who were present during the protests and massacres, and discusses the deep impact of Tiananmen on the subsequent history of China, as well as its implications for the uncertain future of China as the economic gap between the rural peasantry and the urban elite grows ever wider.

Male and Gebi, grass mud horses

“A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

…
The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.”

from today’s NYT article “A Dirty Pun Tweak’s China’s Online Censors”

Danwei’s commentary.

Merchandise available here.

“Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 63 percent of the world’s Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision-making process about what controversial user-generated content goes down or stays up on YouTube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo-sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google.com. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.”

Who better to give the role of deciding censorship than a Chinese woman? Even at Google, it’s the Chinese who have the power of censorship!

The rest at NYTimes.com