Friday, January 06, 2006

More on MSN censorship

the outcry is continuing in an old style - big media join in the buzz, msn is labeled as "evil", and a "say no to msn space" is organized, just like a hollywood moive, "bad guy " is always defeated through a war or a fight.

as a multinational who enjoys a dominating role in the market, microsoft is an easy target to hate, and this time the company sacrificed one of the core values that americans cherish in exchange for business benefits. the angry towards msn is quite understandable, but seems less relevant with chinese netizens. it's less relevant for two simple reasons, first, it's not msn that removed anti's blog, it's chinese internet censorship, and second, like always, such confrontational and emotional outcry has never brought anything positive to help eliminate or alleviate the internet censorship in china.

a few days ago, there were some exchanges between john of the sinosplice and roland of eswn, they discussed why eswn blog hasn't been heavily censored and speculated that english blogs didn't get the same attention from censors for the reason that even the most provoking blog, if it's in english, doesn't reach many chinese readers. it makes me thinking of one chinese forum called "kaidi". if you ever read the forum, you will find that it's full of anti-ccp, anti-china, pro-japan, pro-america, pro-taiwan bullshits, although the forum enjoys a wide popularity among chinese readers, it has seldom banned before. as i know, the moderator has learned something from a commentator called "stainlesssteel minnie" and only censored those comments that ask for taking actions. it tells us two things, the censorship policies are implicit, but no matter how fluid and implicit, they have boundries and a minimum "rationality".

as soon as censorship policies are made explicit, a consensus is reached between the censors and censored, that is that the censorship policies are made based on certain "rationalities", and those "rationalities" could become a base to reduce and destroy the censorship. things like this should be the starting point to fight against censorship, not something like a "boycott msn" campaign.

posted @ 9:35 PM

MSN censorship - business for money or business for ethics?

a-n-t-i's blog at msn space was removed entirely. i speculate that anti's latest post about Beijing News is just an excuse for msn to remove the entire a-n-t-i blog, since msn clearly understands that the existence of such a blog jeopardises msn's buseinss prospects in china, which was (and will be) determined by their "relationship" with teh government.

msn is mean, but it has the right to be mean. the market offers the customers the right of choice to knock out such companies. in the case of a multinational like msn, although it's not likely for customers to knock out msn, they still have a lot of other blog host services to replace msn space, and by doing so, msn has to evaluate the trade-off between the immediate customer loss and future business gains, if in the future, the customer loss caused by censorship exceeds the business gains promised by censorship, then i'm sure msn space will take a much loose policy to censor its content.

so, in my opinion, msn just did what a foreign company should do in a media environment like china's, it was absolutely a correct business decision to remove a-n-t-i's blog, with the price of suspicions of its ethical standards in exchange for eliminating the risk of the whole business operations in china.

the problem dosen't lay between msn and chinese netizens or msn and chinese government, it's a problem between the chinese netizens and chinese censors. there are something that msn could improve when dealing with such censorship actions, like a clearer and explicit policy, advance warnings and a backup of the deleted contents, but to blame msn not defending the core value of free speech and ignore what that might cost the company in china market is just too naive and unfair to msn.

posted @ 12:07 PM