Distrubing Trends in Southeast Asian Censorship
It what is becoming an unfortunate common practice in Southeast Asia, The China Beat links to reports out of Vietnam that a number of websites, and Facebook in particular, are being blocked by the government.
News agencies are citing an unverified document that says it’s from Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security and states, “For security reasons and to fight against propagative activities that oppose the Party and the government, Department of Professional Technology – Office of Security Administration – Ministry of Public Security suggests that the addressed companies to apply technical methods to block thoroughly these following websites:” followed by a list of eight websites including two Facebook addresses.
Of the web sites listed, Facebook has gotten the most attention from the press and from Vietnam’s blogging community, many of whom had set up shop there after social networking site Yahoo! 360 was shut down this August. Almost five years of content was removed and many users lost friend lists and comments. Yahoo offered replacement services Yahoo! 360Plus and Yahoo! Profile, which have less functionality.
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The new restrictions on internet access are another step in the tightening of Vietnam’s media following its comparatively freer policy in the run-up to gaining entry into the World Trade Organization in January 2007. In 2005 and 2006 a number of stories reporting corruption featured prominently in the press, most notably the PMU 18 scandal, but in late 2008, political discussion in blogs was banned and users were told to post personal content only. Many Vietnamese language websites that directly and indirectly criticize the government have been blocked.
This is a disturbing trend, to say the least. The China Beat lists the other blocked websites, as well as provides a short summary of what those websites provide - fyi they tend to promote human rights and democracy. What makes it all the more disturbing is news out of China regarding the cooperation of a number of high-profile technology companies with the country’s Great Firewall.
Following the examples set by Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is drawing attention for “sanitizing results” of searches in China. That’s short hand for censoring restricted words and phrases, if you didn’t pick it up. The Shanghaiist post says Opera is similarly cooperating, pointing to this blog post.
The Times Nicholas Kristoff also weighed in over the weekend, with some harsh words for the cooperators and calling for a boycott of Bing. Kristoff’s article (and his earlier one from June) are a bit … oh, hostile. And he directs most of his wrath at Microsoft, to the extent that he may discount how involved Chinese officials are. But regardless it points to the continued inability of any significant organization to take a stand against the assault on open access to Chinese citizens.
