AS BLOGS become big business, Internet giants have begun trying to profit from new forms of journalism, including war coverage. The results are not encouraging. Yahoo's latest experiment reveals that it considers war news just another form of entertainment. This from an online giant that has already shown it is cavalier about press freedom and a friend of oppression. Look back to 2004, when...
Mr. Yang, My name is Liu Xiaobo. I was born in Changchun, China, in 1955, and am now a freelance writer in Beijing. I can't address you as the "respectful Mr. Yang", because I write this letter for the sake of my friend Shi Tao, who is now in a Chinese prison. In preparation for writing this letter, I read your resume for the first time and learned that you co-created the Yahoo! Internet...
On the eve of the 56th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has released a report of an investigation into the role of the news agency Xinhua News Agency in the system of propaganda and censorship put in place by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). With less than three years to go before the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, the worldwide press freedom...
On the afternoon of April 20, 2004 Shi Tao, head of the Editorial Department of Contemporary Business News, located in Hunan Province, PRC, took notes at a department meeting. Those notes contained references to information in a CPC official document entitled: "A Notice Regarding Current Stabilizing Work" -- a euphemism for the central government's efforts to keep dissent to a minimum on the eve...
China's new Internet rules China tightened its already stringent regulations on Internet content this week. A September 25 statement from the Ministry of Information Industry banned "subversive" material–including pornography, criticism of the government, and sensitive topics like Tibet and Taiwan independence–from the country's computer networks. Instead, only "healthy, civilized news and...
China's repressive government may one day allow the full flood of the Internet to sweep through Chinese society, but for now it is still dedicated to building ever higher and stronger seawalls against liberating knowledge. Over the weekend, two state censorship agencies issued new and more stringent rules about what news can be published on the Internet and who can publish it. The rules...
This week's revelations involving a Chinese journalist sentenced to 10 years in jail for revealing state secrets indicates the weaknesses of human rights and corporate behavior in the virtual world. Media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders in Paris issued a scathing indictment of Yahoo! China for its IP address information sharing that contributed to the arrest and conviction of Shi Tao, a...
As U.S. technology companies pour investments into China, the one thing they’re not exporting is good old-fashioned American values of individual freedom. French media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders called Yahoo Inc. "a Chinese police informant" earlier this week after it gave information about a journalist's personal email account to the Beijing government, which has imprisoned him for...
Yahoo! Inc co-founder Jerry Yang said that the company legally had no choice but to provide Chinese authorities with information used to prosecute and jail Chinese journalist Shi Tao for 10 years. Yang said that the company had a very clear-cut set of privacy rules and that in every country that it operates when it provides information to governments it must be supported by legal rules and...
The role of the US Internet firm Yahoo in helping Chinese security officials to finger a journalist sentenced to 10 years for e-mailing "state secrets" is filtering into mainland China. The revelation reinforces a conviction among many Chinese "netizens" that there is no place security forces can't find them. Yet if netizen reaction in China is resignation, the story of Yahoo's complicity in the...
