DELEGATING CENSORSHIP TO PRIVATE BUSINESSES

Q: How does the Chinese government monitor millions of blogs?
A: It doesn’t.
It outsources. To whom? To blog-hosting businesses, who censor their “business processes in order to remain in the good graces of the authorities” (38).

Q2: How do these blog-hosting businesses censor?

A2: They keep lists of forbidden words, which are kept and updated by service providers who plug the keywords into monitoring and filtering software (38).

In February 2006, the Washington Post got a hold of a “forbidden word” list from one blog-hosting company; there were 236 words on the list; 18 of the words were obscenities. “The rest were related to politics or current affairs.” The “forbidden list” is not provided by the government, but is left to the company to create and design for the “government’s satisfaction” (38).

One of the blog-hosting companies with a “forbidden word” list was Microsoft’s MSN Spaces, the Chinese-language version of which was launched in the summer of 2005. The list was used to prevent users from posting words from the list in blog titles, and to flag blogs that may be “problematic” in the future” (38).

Because MSN Spaces was monitoring their blogs in this way, “the Chinese government agreed not to block MSN blogs at the Internet Service Provider level, as is often done with many other popular international blog services like Wordpress.com and Blogger.com” (38).

MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134.1 (2008): 31-46.