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World Day Against Cyber-Censorship is this coming Monday March 12.

Heres the official description for that:

World Day Against Cyber-Censorship (on 12 March 2011) is intended to rally everyone in support of a single Internet without restrictions and accessible to all. Never have so many countries been affected by some form of online censorship, whether arrests or harassment of netizens, online surveillance, website blocking or the adoption of repressive Internet laws. Netizens are being targeted by government reprisals. Around 120 of them are currently detained for expressing their views freely online. World Day Against Cyber-Censorship pays tribute to them and their fight for Internet freedom.

Google wrote a blog post about its approach to content removal today, gearing up for the event. The company says nothing has changed since it first outlined its approach, four years ago.

At Google, we have a bias in favor of free expressionnot just because its a key tenet of free societies, but also because more information generally means more choice, more power, more economic opportunity and more freedom for people, writes Rachel Whetstone, Senior Vice President, Global Communications and Public Policy. As Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

That said, we recognize that there are limits, she adds. In some areas its obvious where to draw the line. For example, we have an all-product ban on child pornography. But in other areas, like extremism, it gets complicated because our products are available in numerous countries with widely varying laws and cultures.

Google says it takes down as little as possible when it comes to search, though it does remove content from results when required by law. As far as Googles user-generated content sites, it relies on use guidelines and polices these sites (like YouTube, Blogger, Google+, etc.) accordingly.

Google, of course, has its transparency report, where you can go anytime to see content removal requests (as well as data requests) by country.

Last month, an Indian court ordered some web companies, including Google (and Facebook), to filter some content deemed morally or religiously objectionable.

Read this article:
Google On How It Censors Content (Ahead Of World Day Against Cyber-Censorship)

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Library event brings censorship awareness

Terms related to political activists, anti-government movements and state censorship efforts are the most likely to be censored on Chinese blogs and social media sites, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

The "Chinese Firewall" is known to blocks certain websites - including parts of Google and Facebook - but the CMU study is one of the first to examine individual messages, words and terms that have been censored.

SLIDESHOW: Photos: Saatchi & Saatchi's Bangkok office is off the hook

An inside look at censorship in China

Researchers found that the names Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo, two Chinese political protesters, as well as the term Linagui, which is a code term for planned protests, are blocked on Chinese websites and microblogs called weibos at high rates.

Researchers studied 57 million messages posted on Sina Weibo, which is a Chinese microblogging site akin to Facebook or Twitter with 200 million users. Researchers used the site's API to find terms that had been deleted.

During a two-day period in July, 93 of 114 messages on Sina Weibo containing the name of Tiananmen Square protester Jian Zemin, who was rumored to have died, were deleted. Researchers also found that politically sensitive terms, such as the name of Fang Binying, one of the reported architects of the Chinese Firewall, is likely to be blocked, as was a term meaning "to ask someone to resign," especially after a deadly high-speed rail crash last year.

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Even less innocuous terms were found to be censored, including words meaning iodized salt and radioactive iodine, which researchers found had high delete rates after the Japanese earthquake when there were some fears of salt contamination.

The study also found that some geographic areas had high levels of censorship compared to others. In Tibet, for example, which has been fighting for political freedom from the Chinese government, more than half of the posts originating from the area were deleted.

See the original post:
Chinese Firewall's most blocked terms

Public release date: 7-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Byron Spice bspice@cs.cmu.edu 412-268-9068 Carnegie Mellon University

PITTSBURGHResearchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science analyzed millions of Chinese microblogs, or "weibos," to uncover a set of politically sensitive terms that draw the attention of Chinese censors. Individual messages containing the terms were often deleted at rates that could vary based on current events or geography.

The study is the first large-scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, a topic that drew attention and controversy earlier this year when Twitter announced a country-by-country policy for removing tweets that don't comply with local laws.

In China, where online censorship is highly developed, the researchers found that oft-censored terms included well-known hot buttons, such as Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government, and human rights activists Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo. Others varied based on events; Lianghui, a term that normally refers to a joint meeting of China's parliament and its political advisory body, became subject to censorship when it emerged as a code word for "planned protest" during pro-democracy unrest that began in February 2011.

The CMU study also showed high rates of weibo censorship in certain provinces. The phenomenon was particularly notable in Tibet, a hotbed of political unrest, where up to 53 percent of locally generated microblogs were deleted.

The study by Noah Smith, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI); David Bamman, a Ph.D. student in LTI; and Brendan O'Connor, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, appears in the March issue of First Monday, a peer-reviewed, online journal.

"A lot of studies have focused on censorship that blocks access to Internet sites, but the practice of deleting individual messages is not yet well understood," Smith said. "The rise of domestic Chinese microblogging sites has provided a unique opportunity to systematically study content censorship in detail."

The so-called Great Firewall of China, which prevents Chinese residents from accessing foreign websites such as Google and Facebook, is China's best known censorship tool. Other countries also are known to block Web access, such as when Egypt shut down Twitter and other social media sites during last year's Arab Spring protests.

But blocking access to all sites and services is impossible if China or any other country is to harness the Web's commercial and educational potential, Bamman said. An alternative is to allow access to sites, but police the content, eliminating messages deemed objectionable. Automated methods may be used to eliminate some messages, while others are deleted manually, he noted. Seldom are all weibos with a sensitive term deleted, but anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that certain messages are targeted.

Originally posted here:
Carnegie Mellon performs first large-scale analysis of 'soft' censorship of social media in China

The study is the first large-scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, a topic that drew attention and controversy earlier this year when Twitter announced a country-by-country policy for removing tweets that don't comply with local laws.

In China, where online censorship is highly developed, the researchers found that oft-censored terms included well-known hot buttons, such as Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government, and human rights activists Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo. Others varied based on events; Lianghui, a term that normally refers to a joint meeting of China's parliament and its political advisory body, became subject to censorship when it emerged as a code word for "planned protest" during pro-democracy unrest that began in February 2011.

The CMU study also showed high rates of weibo censorship in certain provinces. The phenomenon was particularly notable in Tibet, a hotbed of political unrest, where up to 53 percent of locally generated microblogs were deleted.

The study by Noah Smith, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI); David Bamman, a Ph.D. student in LTI; and Brendan O'Connor, a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, appears in the March issue of First Monday, a peer-reviewed, online journal.

"A lot of studies have focused on censorship that blocks access to Internet sites, but the practice of deleting individual messages is not yet well understood," Smith said. "The rise of domestic Chinese microblogging sites has provided a unique opportunity to systematically study content censorship in detail."

The so-called Great Firewall of China, which prevents Chinese residents from accessing foreign websites such as Google and Facebook, is China's best known censorship tool. Other countries also are known to block Web access, such as when Egypt shut down Twitter and other social media sites during last year's Arab Spring protests.

But blocking access to all sites and services is impossible if China or any other country is to harness the Web's commercial and educational potential, Bamman said. An alternative is to allow access to sites, but police the content, eliminating messages deemed objectionable. Automated methods may be used to eliminate some messages, while others are deleted manually, he noted. Seldom are all weibos with a sensitive term deleted, but anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that certain messages are targeted.

"You even see some weibos where the writer asks, 'Is this going to be deleted?'" O'Connor said. In late 2010, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opened an account on a Chinese microblog site; within an hour of sending a message about Falun Gong, his account was shut down.

To study this "soft" censorship, the CMU team analyzed almost 57 million messages posted on Sina Weibo, a domestic Chinese microblog site similar to Twitter that has more than 200 million users. They collected samples of weibos from June 27 to Sept. 30, 2011, using an application programming interface (API) that Sina Weibo provides to developers so they can build related services.

Using the same API, they later checked a random subset of weibos to see if they still existed and another subset that included terms known to be politically sensitive. If a weibo was deleted, Sina would return what the researchers came to regard as an ominous message: "target weibo does not exist."

See more here:
First large-scale analysis of 'soft' censorship of social media in China