Effortless English DVD1 LEVEL 3 | LESSON 10 Microsoft’s Cyber Censorship |LEARN ENGLISH EVERYDAY

Описание: Effortless English DVD1 LEVEL 3 | LESSON 10 Microsoft’s Cyber Censorship |LEARN ENGLISH EVERYDAY
In December 2005 Microsoft cooperated with Chinese authorities to shut
down the controversial blog of Zhao Jing (Michael Anti), a Beijing-based
researcher for the New York Times, and an active critic of censorship in
China.
The blog, which was hosted on servers located in the United States, was
removed and was therefore censored not only in China but globally.
Reacting to criticism, Microsoft claims to have implemented a new set of
standards to ensure that they will only remove blogs when they receive formal legal notice from the Chinese government and that access will only be
denied to users in China.
Microsoft’s search engine MSN China filters the results of searches for
politically sensitive terms, displaying a message in Chinese which states
‘Certain content was removed from the results of this search’. Searches
undertaken in June 2006 by AI produced this message for the words ‘Falun
Gong’, ‘Tibet Independence’ and ‘June 4’ (the date of the Tiananmen Square
massacre).
Furthermore, Microsoft has admitted that it responds to directions from the
Chinese government by restricting users of MSN Spaces from using certain
terms in their account name, space name, space sub-title or in photo captions. At the same time the company asserts that MSN Spaces do not filter
blog content in any way. Amnesty International considers this claim to be at
odds with the facts.
When Microsoft launched MSN Spaces in China in June 2005, attempts to
create blogs with words including ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom
of expression’ were blocked, producing the following error message (in
Chinese): ‘You must enter a title for your space. The title must not contain
prohibited language, such as profanity. Please type a different title.’ Tests
by AI carried out in 2006 demonstrated continued blocking of certain terms
Microsoft’s Cyber Censorship