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Internet censorship is infamous in China, but average citizens have apparently found a workaround and posted hundreds of comments on President Barack Obama's Google+ 2012 election campaign page.

The message: Governments can put up all the roadblocks they want to keep their people from communicating freely, but crafty technology buffs often find a way to break through those barriers.

Many of the comments are innocuous, while others pointedly implore the U.S. president to help China become more open and free. Some specifically call for the release of civil rights activists Chen Guangcheng and Liu Xiaobo, both of whom are held in China -- Guangcheng for investigating forced abortions in the country and Xiaobo, a 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, for "incitement of subversion of state power."

Some media outlets are saying the Chinese accessed Obama's Google+ page "after China seemingly lifted longstanding blocks." But, China most likely didn't do any such thing.

Silicon Valley technology pundit Mike Elgan, who often writes for PCWorld, asked the more than 726,000 people who follow his Google+ account this question, "Can people in China get on Google+?"

Mike ElganThe question returned hundreds of answers, many coming from people inside China. Many of the answers he received point to the success many Chinese have in circumventing the country's firewall by using mobile phones instead of a PC to get onto Google+. Others say using a VPN works.

You can keep track of Elgan on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Joshua Kiley, a tech-savvy English teacher working in China, wrote on Elgan's Google+ page, "Google Plus is the easiest website to unblock in Chin [sic], because all you need is a couple IP's to copy and paste into your hosts file. For good measure I also changed my DNS to Google's free DNS at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.”

Follow Christina on Twitter and Google+ for even more tech news and commentary and follow Today@PCWorld on Twitter, too.

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Google+ Workaround Found By Chinese Critical of Internet Censorship

Published: 2/25/2012 9:14 PM | Last update: 2/25/2012 9:14 PM By Cal Thomas

Pat Buchanan might have seen the end of the line coming at MSNBC when, last month, network president Phil Griffin commented on his latest book, "Suicide of a Superpower," by saying, "I don't think the ideas that (Buchanan) put forth are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC."

----------advertisement----------- When Buchanan was let go last week after 10 years as a commentator on the network, no one was surprised.

I don't agree with some of Buchanan's ideas, especially regarding Jews, his questioning of whether World War II had to happen or whether the United States should be involved militarily in the Middle East, but he has every right to his ideas, as we all have the right to our own. It's called free speech.

The approach to free speech should be like the one taken by the ACLU in 1977 when neo-Nazis made plans to march through the Jewish suburb of Skokie, Ill. While deploring their views, the ACLU defended the group's right to express itself.

Today, is censorship the new pluralism?

Actor Ben Jones, who starred as "Cooter" on the television show "The Dukes of Hazzard," wrote to tell me about a decision by NASCAR to ban the car known as the "General Lee" from appearing at the Sprint Cup series race at Phoenix next month. The image of the Confederate flag on the car's roof, said NASCAR spokesman David Higdon, "...is not something that should play an official role in our sport as we continue to reach out to new fans and make NASCAR more inclusive."

Jones said in a recent statement, "At a time when tens of millions of Americans are honoring their Union and Confederate ancestors during this Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, NASCAR has chosen to dishonor those Southerners who fought and died in that terrible conflict by caving to 'political correctness' and the uninformed concerns of corporate sponsors.

"This is also an extraordinary insult to rural Southerners, who are NASCAR's oldest and most fervent fan base, and it sends a message against inclusion and against the need for diversity."

Is conformity the new diversity?

Jones is not only an actor, but a former Democratic member of Congress from Georgia and a strong civil rights proponent.

When the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the burning of the American flag as free speech, while the free exercise of religion is being curtailed at many levels, is this not censoring a particular category of expression? Censorship is also moving beyond its classic definition into a new and even more dangerous area.

As The Daily Caller, a 24-hour news site founded by conservative pundit Tucker Carlson and former Cheney aide Neil Patel, has reported, a liberal group known as Media Matters has not only fed talking points to some reporters and opinion columnists, it has been campaigning to get people fired when they hold ideas with which the left disagrees. According to the Caller, Media Matters hired people to investigate the lives of Fox News employees and compiled an "enemies list." Media Matters didn't respond directly to the charges; its founder, David Brock, instead pointed to Reuters' criticism of the Caller's "bad journalism" and "lame propaganda" as the reason for Media Matters' silence.

These and many other attempts to suppress speech and force people into a universal and "acceptable" belief system harm freedom. Suppressing speech changes not a single mind. The freedom to debate ideas and present arguments in support of a position is what separates the United States from most other nations.

Do we want to become like countries that have the equivalent of "thought police," smothering speech and penalizing anyone who refuses to toe the party line? Should I be prevented from asking this question?Email Cal Thomas at tmseditors@tribune.com.

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Is censorship the new pluralism?

Enlarge Jim Cooper/AP

Barney Rosset paid $3,000 for Grove Press in 1951. Then he used the company to help tear down American obscenity laws of the 1950s and '60s.

Jim Cooper/AP

Barney Rosset paid $3,000 for Grove Press in 1951. Then he used the company to help tear down American obscenity laws of the 1950s and '60s.

This interview was originally broadcast on Apr. 9, 1991.

Publisher Barney Rosset, who championed the works of beat poets and defied censors, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Rosset's Grove Press published some of drama's most famous names — including Beckett and Anton Chekhov — and was known for printing books that other publishers wouldn't touch, from uncensored versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer to a highly profitable line of Victorian spanking porn.

To publish them, Rosset became a crusader against American censorship laws, challenging Postal Service confiscations and fighting obscenity charges all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His landmark legal cases opened doors for other publishers when he won.

In 1991, Rosset joined Terry Gross for a wide-ranging discussion about his years in the publishing business.

"When I started publishing, I most definitely would have liked to have published Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald," he said, "but they were already published."

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Barney Rosset: A Crusader Against Censorship Laws

Twitter has responded to criticisms that it censored users parodying the French president Nicolas Sarkozy when he opened an account on the social network on 15 February.

Twitter has responded to accusations of censorship in France after it reportedly took down four user accounts for impersonating French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Image credit: Downing Street/Flickr

Digital rights group Internet Without Borders (Internet Sans Frontieres) said on Sunday that the accounts were taken down in response to a real Sarkozy account being opened. It added that they were all clear parody accounts and not an attempt to impersonate the French president.

"Speaking publicly of individual, specific cases of suspension is a breach of confidentiality and security. That said, we would like to provide this context for the recent suspensions," Twitter said in a post on its French blog.

"Parody is tolerated and encouraged on Twitter, so long as it respects not merely some, but all, of the conditions stated publicly in our parody policy. An impersonating account is suspended when it a) violates our parody policy and b) is reported by the person being impersonated," the company added.

Additionally, Twitter said it only resorts to automated suspension s for accounts which violate the spam section of the Twitter rules, and that even in this case, suspended users are "often granted" a second chance to comply with the rules.

The role of social networks, such as Twitter, for organisational and coordination purposes has been witnessed in recent world events such as the Arab Spring uprisings and London riots in 2011.

"Twitter plays an integral role in political discourse all over the world. We understand and support the critical need for citizens and politicians to engage in real-time conversations about important issues — and we would never stand in the way of that," the company said. "However, we will also protect the user experience on Twitter, which includes ensuring our policies are followed."

When ZDNet UK checked Twitter, a number of Sarkozy parody accounts were still active at the time of writing.

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Twitter explains Sarkozy 'censorship'

The country's decision to block the Uzbek-language wiki may be more about showmanship and nationalism than controlling information.

Wikipedia.org

Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia is censorship as performance art. The ban, enacted late last month, blocks all articles written in Uzbek while leaving articles in other languages accessible. Unlike earlier acts of online censorship, the ban on Uzbek Wikipedia articles does not prevent citizens from accessing political information. On the contrary, it blocks a prime venue of innocuous diversion: the thousands of articles about pop stars, national heroes, and sports figures that comprise the Uzbek-language Wikipedia. Uzbeks unable to access the Uzbek-language Wikipedia may now turn instead to the Russian-language Wikipedia, a virtual treasure trove of Uzbekistan's state-suppressed memories that could not possibly merit official approval. So why block the Uzbek version? What does it accomplish?

Like its English-language counterpart, the Uzbek Wikipedia is an idiosyncratic collection that represents the diverse interests of its users. The best entries, as rated by moderators, are Cristiano Ronaldo, the Republic of Korea, Philosophy, and Alisher Navoi (a 15th century Uzbek poet). Other user favorites include Kelly Clarkson, Nirvana (the band), Internet Explorer, and a Finnish symphonic metal group called Nightwish. Pop culture entries tend to skew toward foreign tastes: the recently updated Uitni Hyuston entry, for example, is longer than that of popular Uzbek singer Yulduz Usmonova. Though the Uzbek government can be capricious in its censorship, the Uzbek Wikipedia is assiduously unprovocative - indeed, Uzbeks writing about national hero Navoi is exactly the sort of thing that the state encourages. Skimming the list of 7,890 entries, I found more of the same apolitical fare: an epic piece on FIFA; a treatise on plov.

What is missing from the Uzbek Wikipedia? Information on contemporary political life. President Karimov has a short, perfunctory entry, and all opposition figures and parties are absent. The chronology of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a source of domestic tension for decades, terminates in 1991. The Uzbek entry for Andijon, the site of the brutal state crackdown on civilian protest in 2005, contains two lines detailing its geographic location and its founding as a city in 1297. Contrast this with the entry on Andijon in the Russian Wikipedia - not banned in Uzbekistan -  a long, contentious account that notes the deaths of innocent citizens and their subsequent labeling as "criminals" by the Karimov regime.

I have a suspicion that what prompted the Wikipedia ban at the end of the January was the addition, on January 24, of the following entries: "seks", "penis", "gey", and "jinsiy aloqa" (sexual relations), which come complete with helpful illustrations. This would be in keeping with the government's aversion to overt sexual content, which they believe threatens national values. (Note that this is simply a theory - I have no inside knowledge as to the reason for the ban, nor has the Uzbek government addressed it. ) But that still leaves the question of why the Russian or English Wikipedias remain open to the public when they contain even more sexual imagery and political content.

Here it is useful to look not only at what is being censored, but where - because the question of "where" content exists online is more complex for regimes that derive their power from narrow definitions of nationalism. Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia has less to do with blocking access to information than it does with territorializing an ambiguous Uzbek ethnolinguistic virtual space. As I argued in a 2010 article, the Uzbek government views the Internet as a virtual extension of its sovereign dominion, and sees Uzbek-language content as subject to its jurisdiction. Under this logic, state intervention is  more justified when Uzbeks write encyclopedia entries in Uzbek than it is when Uzbeks read encyclopedia entries in Russian, because those entries do not lie on the state's ethnically demarcated virtual "territory". (That said, I see censorship of the Russian version in Uzbekistan's future.)

Censorship in authoritarian states is not purely practical - it is an act of showmanship, and in this case, one-upmanship over a foreign threat. Large, foreign platforms challenge the Karimov regime not only through the interaction they facilitate, but through their ambiguous territorial standing. Last summer, Uzbekistan's state officials responded to Facebook by creating Muloqot, a state-run social media network which only Uzbeks in Uzbekistan can use. By censoring the Uzbek-language Wikipedia, state authorities mark a similarly ambiguous collaborative space as Uzbekistan state territory -- territory subject online, as it is on the ground, to strict government control.

This post originally appeared at Registan.net and is reproduced with permission

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Censorship as Performance Art: Uzbekistan's Bizarre Wikipedia Ban