Online Activism: Adopt a Chinese Blog
There have been a number of articles in the news recently about China’s censorship of bloggers who [attempt to] write about democracy or human rights– In particular, Microsoft has come under fire for facilitating China’s censorship efforts by setting certain words [eg, “freedom”, “democracy”] as triggers for a disabling error message.*
Today I learned of a wiki project that coordinates “adoption” of Chinese blogs through web-hosting by volunteer bloggers:
This is how it works. A blog (or any website, really) using an independent hosting service hosts a blocked blog. (This simply means creating a subdirectory where the adopted blog can be published and store its files.) The host blog should not have a significant readership in the country where the adopted blog is blocked, because the host blog is running a (small) risk of being blocked in that country.
…By distributing the blocked blogs across a variety of hosts, the task of blocking a large number of blogs becomes increasingly difficult. If any adopted blog is blocked, it can say its thank yous and farewells to its host and then move onto a new host.
I’m not exactly sure why hosting is necessary, seeing as there are quite a few free services out there… Do those tend to be blocked? Can someone explain why such an adoption system is necessary?
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* Iran has also tightened its internet controls– and interestingly, both countries’ repressive tactics seem limited in effectiveness only to their respective native languages. For example:
Anti-censorship activists have found that if a user creates the blog in English, it bypasses such filtering, even if it is later switched to Chinese.
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** Also of interest: Reporters without Borders has released a list of the best blogs defending freedom of expression– definitely worth taking a look at. Some of the authors face imprisonment or other threats for their writing.
