China’s great wall of fire

A lot of my blogging thus far has been about the intellectual property side of online freedoms. I decided that this week I would focus more on freedom of speech, and censorship, on the internet. It turns out that online censorship has been making international headlines recently due to the suit bought against Yahoo! for aiding in the imprisonment and torture of Chinese bloggers. The USA branch of The World Organization for Human Rights claims that Yahoo! assisted in human rights violations by giving up the information of a dissident Chinese journalist (one of many over the past few years) which resulted in his arrest and torture.

Yahoo! says that it had no choice in the matter because its Chinese subsidiary is obligated to follow Chinese information laws, however, the World Organization for Human Rights argues that the company should also consider international ethical and legal standards.

Despite pressure from international organizations and lawsuits such as the aforementioned example, it seems unlikely that things are going to change anytime soon. Internet censorship in China is deeply entrenched and strongly enforced. The Golden Shield Project, also known as the Great Firewall of China, has provided an infrastructure for an internet police task force, who work as censors and monitors. IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection and URL filtering also suppress freedom of speech on the internet in mainland China. Through these channels of oppression, various comments and content are removed everyday, especially those which are critical of the government or which are related to taboo subjects (such as democracy, outlawed groups and the International Tibet Independence Movement).

As bloggers in a country which allows for freedom of expression, South African journalists need to be aware of journalists elsewhere who don’t have the same freedoms, and who risk imprisonment or torture for fulfilling their journalistic duties.