I watched the lecture given by Michael Anti: Behind The Great Firewall of China, and actually really enjoyed it. I was aware of the media censorship happening in China, however I was interested to learn that “copy cat” social media platforms have been developed in China to replace sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
Lecturer Michael Anti stated that less than a month after Twitter was banned in China, the copy cat website ‘Weibo’ was up and running. This means that the site owners convinced the strict Chinese government in one month to replicate Twitter within its own borders. The government has just banned most forms of social media, so why develop a new platform? As Michael points out, it is beneficial for the Chinese government to have its own social media platform because they can easily and effectively monitor the movements and behaviour of over 300 million of its citizens. It was interesting to note that if you entered code words into your posts, such as “meet up” or “gathering”, Chinese authorities would be straight onto you and there would be “police waiting for you when you got there”. So yes, I was aware of the media censorship taking place in China, however I was not aware of the extent of it.
With further research, I learned that recently a liberal Chinese newspaper protested about China’s censorship laws for a week outside their building. The government arrested more than a dozen protesters, as well as forcing newspapers to run a pro-censorship editorial. The authorities also shut down any online discussion of the incident. In Australia, it would be almost impossible to shut down all online discussion of an issue, there just wouldn’t be any way to monitor it all. However, just the click of a button in Beijing and everything ever written about the conflict was deleted. Pretty scary.
Although censorship is continuing to rise in China, it is a comfort to know that the Chinese have developed their own ways of social networking, and are able to spread news and thoughts amongst each other. Even if the government is watching their every move…
Alexandra Says 