Microblogs on radar of official scrutiny
By Jules Quartly (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-22 09:18
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The genie is out of the bottle and he's not going back. I refer, of course, to microblogging and what appears to be a change in tack on the part of the authorities toward social networking.
When the plug was pulled on Twitter a year ago a number of domestic versions rolled out and quickly became a hit among the masses, encouraged by celebrities like Jolin Tsai, who can twitter on all day about her crystal nails and attract hundreds of thousands of followers.
It sounds innocent enough but clearly the government has reservations about microblogs, which is why last weekend some of the biggest sites "closed for maintenance" and beta tags were added. This got users worried there would be a complete shutdown, though there have been reassuring noises from the companies concerned this won't happen.
I'm told the reason for this "glitch" is that porn sites and banned content were being accessed from the microblogs. The upshot was that access to foreign websites and questionable domestic blogs were curtailed.
It should be added, however, most users have not been inconvenienced and when I added a link to a foreign website yesterday on my Sina Weibo account, it was converted into a shortened link which directly sent me to the site. So, there has been no effect from my point of view.
The reason for the government's caution could have something to do with the publication two weeks ago of the Blue Book of New Media published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that concluded social networking sites have privacy issues and could threaten State security.
It is not that much different here, though, than anywhere else. Case in point is the removal last week of 73,000 blogs hosted by blogetery.com in the United States "by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server".
In the US, sites and posts are routinely removed because of piracy, racism, copyright infringement and for any other number of reasons. On this occasion, Internet rumors are saying Al-Qaeda set up a website with a hit list and bomb making instructions.
Most people would agree that if this was the case then the site should come down.
"Free speech" is not absolute and when there are platforms where you are "free" to say what you like there will inevitably be those who post items that are not just socially unacceptable, but dangerous.
The point is where to draw the line and this, I venture to say, is what is happening at the moment. Hence the beta status of the country's microblogging services.
It would be odd indeed if the government did shut down services like Sina Weibo, which only last month was praised in a government white paper for providing "greater convenience for Chinese citizens to communicate online" and is expected to grow to 120 million users by 2012.
Since the microblogging genie isn't going back in the bottle, he requires some oversight.