Living with Censorship: The Kashmir Experience
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Journalists and editors at an influential and often outspoken newspaper in China have gone on strike in protest of government censorship. The dispute involves a local propaganda official who allegedly called for changes to the publication's annual New Years editorial to its readers. The standoff at the Southern Weekly newspaper is growing from an internal dispute into a national debate about government oversight of the media.
The influential newspaper has long been known for its outspokenness and independent-minded efforts to cover the news in a country where information is a tightly controlled commodity.
Employees say that when they returned from an annual New Years holiday last Thursday they discovered that a section of the paper that was to discuss the touchy topic of constitutional reform had been dramatically changed. That prompted an uproar.
The uproar came first online - on blogs and other Twitter-like Weibo social media sites - with staffers accusing the propaganda chief where the paper is based, in Guangdong province, of making the changes and then, on Monday, in the form of protests outside the companys offices.
Photos of the protesters that managed to briefly get posted online before they were taken down showed some holding up signs and shouting slogans calling for freedom of speech, democracy and political reform.
Li Datong, a former prominent Chinese editor who was fired from a state media organization for his views, says the apparent intervention by the propaganda department appears to be a new tactic for state censors.
"The propaganda department has already changed from the previous mode of censorship after publication to what we see now as a move towards censorship before publication," said Li. "It does not matter if it was Tuo Zhen, himself, but it was the propaganda department that did this. They have transformed what was control after publication to control before publication. This is a very nasty beginning."
Dozens of academics and editors have already begun openly calling, on line, for the resignation of the propaganda chief. Students from Chinas Nanjing University and others have posted pictures of themselves online as well holding cards that cheered the newspaper on urging it to Jia You in Chinese, which means "Go."
Some are already beginning to believe the dispute could become a watershed event that promotes much deeper reforms.
Since Xi Jinping took over as head of the Communist Party in November, journalists have been taking bolder steps in testing the limits of the countrys new team of leaders both in reporting and on editorial pages.
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Censorship Fight at Newspaper in China Grows
BEIJING A dispute over censorship at a Chinese newspaper known for edgy reporting evolved Monday into a political challenge for China's new leadership as prominent scholars demanded a censor's dismissal and hundreds of protesters called for democratic reforms.
The scholars and protesters were acting in support of the newspaper in its confrontation with a top censor after the publication was forced to change a New Year's editorial calling for political reform into a tribute praising the ruling Communist Party. Rumors circulated that at least one of the newspaper's news departments was going on strike, but they could not be immediately confirmed.
CBS News' Shuai Zhang says the situation escalated over the weekend, as the newspaper's management apparently seized control of the paper's official account on Weibo, China's version of Twitter, which has almost 4 million followers in the vast country.
A statement was issued on the account claiming the controversial front-page editorial had been written by staff, and was not a forced alteration.
Editorial staff at the paper, called Southern Weekly, then used their own Weibo accounts to refute the fake message, and decided to stage a strike over the government's apparent hijacking of the account. The social media editor of the paper said on Wiebo that he had lost control of the newspaper's official account and that it was now being updated by the paper's management.
Shuai adds that if staff members do go on strike, it would be the first time in more than two decades that the editorial staff of a major newspaper had openly protested government censorship.
Protesters gathered outside the offices of the newspaper in the southern city of Guangzhou to lay flowers at the gate, hold signs and shout slogans calling for freedom of speech, political reform, constitutional governance and democracy.
"I feel that the ordinary people must awaken," said one of the protesters, Yuan Fengchu, who was reached by phone. "The people are starting to realize that their rights have been taken away by the Communist Party and they are feeling that they are being constantly oppressed."
The protest came as 18 Chinese academics signed an open letter calling for the dismissal of Tuo Zhen, a provincial propaganda minister blamed for the censorship.
The protesting scholars included legal professors, liberal economists, historians and writers.
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China newspaper in rare stand against censorship
Iran's "smart" approach involves monitoring, rather than blocking, its citizens' use of social media.
Customers use computers at an Internet cafe in Tehran on May 9, 2011. (Reuters)
Iran, to put it mildly, has a tense history with the Internet -- some evidence of the acrimony being the many attempts the country has made to curtail its citizens' use of social media.In May, its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,issued a fatwa against anti-filtering toolsthat have helped citizens to access blocked material on the Internet.Last month, Iran launched Mehr,its own version of YouTube, which allows users to upload and view content they create, and to watch videos from IRIB, Iran's national broadcaster. The country has also reportedly been building a government-run network -- a national intranet -- that would operate "largely isolated" from the rest of the World Wide Web. Citing intensified online crackdowns, increased digital surveillance of citizens, and the imprisonment of web activists, Reporters Without Borders named Iran to its 2012 "Enemies of the Internet" list.
But "enemy" can be a murky term -- one complicated by the fact that, given the multitude of workarounds that allow its citizens to access the Internet (some of them helped along by the U.S. government), Iran has been fighting a largely losing battle as far as wholesale censorship is concerned. So the country, in a move that represents equal parts concession and repression, is reportedly taking another tack: According to the AFP, the country is developing "intelligent software" that aims to manipulate, rather than fully control, citizens' access to social networks. Instead of blocking Facebook, or Twitter, or even Google ... the regime, per the report, will allow controlled access to those services. As Iranian police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam put it to Iranian local media, cheerfully: "Smart control of social networks will not only avoid their disadvantages, but will also allow people to benefit from their useful aspects."
This, of course, is not so much enlightened despotism for the Internet age as it is despotism as it's looked in every age. As Evgeny Morozov argued last year in the Wall Street Journal, following up on his book The Net Delusion, savvy dictators don't simply quash the Internet; rather, they find ways to control the Internet. They allow allow their subjects access to the tools afforded by connection, but then use that access to monitor (and, thus, control) their behavior. So, sure, the restriction of access to social networks is one way to maintain that control, and the creation of new and nationalized social networks -- as attempted byVietnam andRussia andUzbekistan, among other regimes -- is another. But another way -- a smarter way -- is simply to repress from within: to give citizens access to the open web, and then control their experience of that web. To invest, in other words, in illusory openness. In surgical censorship.
Granted, "intelligent software," as a technology and as a political strategy, doesn't mean that much; all software is (theoretically) intelligent. While there's a good chance that the system in question would use automated filtering to identify and block controversial content -- and that it would rely for its workings on a "dual stack" approach to IP addressing -- it's unclear from existing reports how, exactly, the software would work. And it's worth remembering that the Iranian government has a mixed track record when it comes to the effectiveness of its own attempts at censorship; recall the episode in October when the country, trying to block YouTube, also inadvertentlyshut down Gmail. And the irony that, due to the regime's apparent reliance on unsophisticated keyword filtration, the fatwa the Ayatollah issued against anti-filtration technologies ended up being censored by the government's own filters.
Still, though, the "intelligent software" announcement is itself revealing: It suggests the increasing normalization of censorship -- and, more specifically, the increasing normalization of strategic censorship. This is the highly effective Chinese model put to use by another regime: Block content if you must, but monitor content first of all. Allow your citizens to indict themselves with the freedom -- "freedom" -- you give them. And that is, as a model, very likely the future of repression -- one in which access to the web won't just be the black-and-white matter of blocked vs. not , but rather something more insidious: curtailing Internet freedom by the very illusion of granting it.As Iran's Moghadam noted, "Smart control of social networks is better than filtering them completely." What's scary is that he's probably right.
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