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Don't google me - I'm china'd
03/02/2006 11:04 - (SA)
If China's cyber censors can ensure that certain Afrikaans e-mails, sent between Afrikaans speakers currently working in China, don't reach their destiny*, imagine what next.
Yes, imagine.
The world's biggest search engine steps in and assists the oppressive government to censor even better.
Oh, pardon, the word is "filter".
Why should this concern you?
You probably have better things to do than worry about the state of freedom of expression in our inter-netted world.
But just imagine the extent of Big Brother peering over our shoulders as we neatly touch type our days away.
To make an already un-free Chinese information highway even more blocked up, Google is joining forces with the Chinese government to build a new type of Great Wall, resulting in blanket censorship across the length and breadth of that country to keep the liberating hordes out of its cyber space.
According to one source, Google justified its decision because "a greater good is served by providing information to China".
More likely a question of crunching the numbers and deciding a chunk of that market is worth the risk to its image?
Censored
At least you will be informed that a page was censored: Google will let you know "that certain web pages had been removed from the list of results on the orders of the government".
No wonder Reporters Without Borders (RWB) accused Google of hypocrisy.
"Freedom of expression isn't a minor principle that can be pushed aside when dealing with a dictatorship," it said.
Apparently, the main taboos are words like the three T's - Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen Square, plus two C's. One is for a "cult", the Falun Gong, a banned spiritual movement. Although it incorporates Buddhist and Taoist principles, it is labeled as a "cult" by the Chinese government. (Go to www.religioustolerance.org for more.)
Oh, the other C? Of course: criticism of the Communist party, according to a source.
And there some of us still believed in Father Christmas, slimming chocolate and the eventual goodness of man (women have always been good). And that the internet and the world wide web are border-less.
Maybe naively, it was seen as a herald of democracy in an information age where a free, seamless medium of communication could not be suppressed by man (of course not women; we don't do such things). Not being bound by national or geographical borders, one tended to think of the new medium as our Great New Liberator.
It seems it has borders. And it has become an active tool of oppression - now also with the help of the biggest search engine.
How is it possible that a product of our information society can contribute to censorship?
Because, once again, money makes our cyber world go round?
The RWB report says US firms' "lofty predictions about the future of a free and limitless Internet conveniently hide their unacceptable moral errors". See www.rsf.org for six recommendations ensuring Internet firms respect freedom of expression when working in repressive countries, published by the RWB earlier this year.
Google has already given us a new verb. Maybe after this, if you vanish from the face of the earth (in fact, far beyond cyber space) there will be another new verb, this time for doing the disappearance act.
Maybe from now on you can also be china'd, my China.
* Want to hear what's really crazy? The Chinese "filters" allowed those Afrikaans vonkposse to glide through cyber space after the offensive Afrikaans words were eliminated.
Lizette Rabe is head of the postgraduate Department of Journalism at the University of Stellenbosch, a Sanef council member and Sanef-convenor for the Western Cape. And she's addicted to news.
Send your comments to Lizette or discuss this column now in our debating forum.
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