Crackdown on Chinese
Bloggers Who Fight the Censors With Puns
By MICHAEL WINES
Published: May 28, 2012
BEIJING — One of China’s
largest hosts of Twitter-like microblogs decreed new punishments on Monday for
users who post comments that its editors — and by extension, China’s government
censors — deem inappropriate.
The service, Sina Weibo,
imposed “user contracts” that award each of its 300 million microbloggers a
starting score of 80 points.
Points can be deducted for
online comments that are judged to be offensive. When a blogger reaches zero,
the service stated, a user’s account will be canceled. Users who suffer lesser
penalties can restore their 80 points by avoiding violations for two months.
Deductions will cover a
wide range of sins, including spreading rumors, calling for protests, promoting
cults or superstitions and impugning China’s honor, the service stated.
Most notably, the
contracts also will punish time-honored tactics that bloggers have used to
avoid censorship, like disguising comments on censored topics by using homonyms
(where two different Chinese characters have nearly identical sounds), puns and
other dodges.
To evade censors, bloggers
have referred to the dissident artist Ai Weiwei by using the Chinese characters
for “love the future,” a rough homonym of his name. Such ploys would be
punished with a loss of points under the new rules.
Sina officials left
unclear how many points a user would lose for a specific violation. But they
said that microbloggers could increase their score to 100 points by supporting
unspecified promotional activities, and would receive “low credit” warnings
should their total fall below 60 points.
The restrictions are not
new by themselves. Government censors already control what appears on the
Internet, and corporate minders at Sina Weibo and other sites have long
complied with their orders, deleting offensive comments, sly homonyms and other
posts that rile the government’s sensibilities.
The point system, however,
appears to be a muted effort to extend that control by warning users when they
approach the boundaries of official tolerance. Internet companies like Sina
that are privately operated tread a thin line between too-lax censorship that
might draw government punishment and overly strict rules that would quash the
lively debates that make the services popular.
The new rules were
announced in early May and took effect on Monday.
Chinese propaganda
authorities have progressively clamped down on the freedoms of Internet users
since last year, when a high-speed train wreck in Zhejiang Province unleashed
an online flood of angry antigovernment comments.
Censors have all but shut
down comments this spring about the scandal involving Bo Xilai, the suspended
Politburo member, and Chen Guangcheng, the dissident who sought refuge in the
United States Embassy in Beijing.
The government briefly
banned users from commenting on microblog posts on Sina Weibo and a rival
service, Tencent QQ, apparently as a warning against spreading rumors about
government instability surrounding Mr. Bo’s troubles.
A version of this article
appeared in print on May 29, 2012, on page A5 of the New York edition with the
headline: Crackdown on Chinese Bloggers Who Fight the Censors With Puns.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/asia/china-cracks-down-on-its-cagey-web-critics.html?_r=1&hp
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