Reporters sans frontières - China

Reporters Without Borders said it was disgusted to find that Microsoft was censoring the Chinese version of its blog tool, MSN spaces, the system automatically rejecting words including “democracy” and “Dalai Lama”.

“Following Yahoo !, here is a second American Internet giant giving way to the Chinese authorities and agreeing to self-censorship”, the worldwide press freedom organisation said.

Reporters Without Borders has been able to check that, as reported by several news agencies, when a Chinese blogger attempts to post a message containing terms such as “democracy”, “Dalai Lama”, “Falungong”, “4 June” (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), “China corruption”, or “human rights”, a warning displays saying, “This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression.”

Google, which has so far refused to censor its search engine, now looks likely to follow in the footsteps of its competitor. When the company announced it was opening an office in China, Reporters Without Borders wrote to its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them to respond clearly to the question : “Would you agree to censorship of your search engine if Beijing asked you to”. Google never replied.

Makes you wonder what the Olympics will be like.