So I wonder what the man representing one-third of of the Times Persons of the Year has to say about political censorship of MSN Spaces blogs? As quoted by LaShawn Barber, Glenn Reynolds, Evan Coyne Maloney, and the Scobelizer, Rebecca MacKinnon explains the sordid details of her experiments:
As it so happens, in mid-December I played around a bit with Chinese language blog-hosting tools to try and get a better idea of how they censor blogger content. I haven’t posted about it yet partially because family business and vacation got in the way, and partially because I wanted to do a few more tests. But given what happened to Anti I think I had better not wait.
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, just like Anti’s was on Dec.31st, 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.
(Emphasis added)
I'm trying to come up with some plausible explanation why Microsoft would be in the business of facilitating political censorship. My first thought was of the MSN Spaces Code of Conduct. But the only thing even close to a rationalization for political censorship is this item under "Prohibited Uses":
You will not upload, post, transmit, transfer, disseminate, distribute, or facilitate distribution of any content, including text, images, sound, data, information, or software, that...is illegal or violates any local and national laws that apply to your location; including but not limited to child pornography, illegal drugs, copyright material and intellectual property not belonging to you.
However, while such wording might justify - in the strictest adherence - to censorship of outlawed speech in China, Rebecca MacKinnon is in the United States, not China. At least the Scobelizer is trying to do something about it:
I’m copying this post to Christopher Payne, corporate Vice President over on MSN and will try to get his point of view on this.
Update: someone over on MSN Spaces just wrote me and said he hadn’t heard of this and that he’s raising this up the management chain too. I’ll report more as I hear more. he told me that Steve Liffick is the VP in charge of MSN Spaces and that he reports to Blake Irving. I’ve sent email to both of those guys on this issue.
I don't care how much money Microsoft stands to lose; shame on them for cow-towing to socialist dictators and for actively infringing upon freedom of speech.
Darn straight! Though in proper Chinese it should be Gates Zedong (Tse-Tung).
Yeah, what he said…