Censors in mainland China are blocking more than 95 percent of blog postings according to reports in the South China Morning Post.
Quoting experts speaking at a regional forum the report (full version below) says there are more than 220 million bloggers in China but most of them have their writing deleted or blocked on the internet.
Censors delete 95pc of blogs a day, forum told
BYLINE: Amy Nip
South China Morning Post
Mainland censors are estimated to delete up to 95 per cent of blog entries posted on the internet every day, according to an academic and veteran blogger.
The source? Official data on internet usage released this week.
There are about 220 million bloggers in China, according to a white paper on the internet published by the State Council on Tuesday.
And more than 66 per cent of internet users frequently post, with over 3 million messages posted via BBS, news commentary sites and blogs every day, the paper said.
But Isaac Mao Xianghui, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, told the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum in the city on Thursday that the official number of postings fell far short of what it should be.
Assuming bloggers who post frequently add 0.5 items per day, there should be 72.6 million entries posted daily – not 3 million, he said.
“The difference between the two [72.6 million and 3 million] reveals that 95.9 per cent of comments could be deleted during the censorship process,” Mao said.
The surging number of internet users on the mainland is creating a big headache for authorities.
When Mao began blogging in 2002, there were fewer than 1,000 bloggers on the mainland. A year later that number had surged to 100,000.
Content in simplified Chinese characters increased by 124 times between 2002 and 2008, according to a study conducted by Mao.
“Internet users are like rats and the censorship mechanism is a cat. There are too many mice and the cat does not know which one to go after,” Mao said.
Beijing shifted its strategy in 2008 to handle the growing volume of content on the internet. Instead of screening website content, it now blocks sites completely, he said.
About 70,000 sub-domain names – major sessions of a website – are blocked on the mainland, including YouTube, Facebook and Picasa. Several new sites are added to the list every day.
But internet users are becoming increasingly familiar with ways to access blocked sites. Savvy bloggers also create duplicates to ensure their writing evades censorship.
Mao said the flood of internet content will likely overwhelm Beijing’s censors by 2014. But he said instead of devoting resources to censorship, the authorities should turn their attention to cyber crime.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s director for Asia-Pacific internet policy, John Galligan, urged governments worldwide to update copyright and privacy protection laws as cross-border data storage gained popularity.
Cloud computing, which lets companies subscribe to software that is accessible through a Web browser, has developed rapidly in recent years. But who owns the information in the cloud – the subscriber or the service provider – has yet to be clearly defined in the international community, said Galligan, who was at the Internet Governance Forum, which was also held in the city. There are still “lots and lots of gaps” as Asian countries move into the digital era, he said.
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