MySpace China: Leak your National Secrets Elsewhere
I like it when I see U.S. companies taking initiative in China and seizing market share — but not in this way.
MySpace now available in China - minus politics and religion
| MySpace, the world’s largest social networking website, has finally come to China, the world’s most populous nation. After months of delays, China’s 1.3 billion citizens are now able to create their own pages on the Chinese-language version of MySpace. But unlike MySpace in other countries, sensitive topics like religion and politics are nowhere to be found on the Chinese site, and users are asked to report ’subversive’ activity.
MySpace, which already has more than 100 million users worldwide, is backed by News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media groups. The company formally announced MySpace China yesterday, and the site went live shortly after midnight in China, with a layout which mimics that of its main global site - with a few key differences. Discussion forums on subjects like religion and politics are nowhere to be found on the new Chinese MySpace site, even though these are popular topics on other international MySpace sites. Instead, users are only offered safer topics for conversation, such as humor, sport and movies. Users are told to click a button if they spot any ‘misconduct’ by other users. This ‘misconduct’ includes actions such as ‘endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order’ – according to the site’s terms and conditions…[more] |
Then again, if all foreign companies decided to pull out of China rather than cens0r their content, would cens0rship gain the added benefit of economic protectionism for China? Would that weaken Beijing’s incentive to loosen controls on free speech?
I tend to agree with the line of reasoning that says that engagement is better than estrangement. However, I don’t think for one second that companies such as News Corp, Yahoo, Microsoft and even Google pay anything more than lip service and a bit of PR towards this principle and are really in it 100% for the money and nothing else.
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