Jun 14
Helping Censor The Internet
This was one of the articles in my bloglines feed this morning:
Wired News: Microsoft Censors Chinese Blogs
This article discusses how Microsoft is working with the Chinese government to adjust it’s web portal to remove words that the government in Beijing finds objectionable - words like “democracy” and “human rights”, amongst others. This isn’t anything new - there have been posts to slashdot and other sites over the last several years about big tech companies (Cisco is another that springs to mind) who actively assist in the censorship of information flowing into or out of China.
The question for me is “should an ethical and responsible company be doing this?” Is this a case of “business is business” or do they have a ethical and moral obligation to stand up for the same principals that we are trying to bring about in the middle east?
I don’t have an answer for this, but the question does bear some thought.
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