contrapositive

MICROSOFT EMBRACES CENSORSHIP When I first read it, I was convinced that this post by Rebecca Mackinnon--about Microsoft's censoring of Chinese language blogs run through MSN Spaces--had to be the product of a hoax or misunderstanding.

But after reading this non-denial, it seems clear that Microsoft is indeed doing something close to what Mackinnon alleges:

Back over the summer I wrote a post titled Screenshots of Censorship about how MSN spaces was censoring the titles of its Chinese blogs, but not posts themselves. According to my testing in mid-late December, they now censoring much more intensely.

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like "Tibet Independence" or "Falun Gong" (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: "This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item."

However I was successful in posting blog entries with non-controversial titles, but with politically sensitive words in the text body. For instance, a blog post titled "I love you" had "Tibet independence" in the text body, and a post titled "I am happy" had "Falun Gong" in the body...

This was on Friday December 16th. By Monday the 19th, the whole blog had been taken down...with an error message: "This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."

Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible from the United States as well as from China. This means that the action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering and censoring the internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers.

If it's true, it's a disgrace.