Microsoft Silences Chinese Dissenter
Image courtesy Tom G Palmer
The Daily Telegraph, Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge
MICROSOFT has been accused of co-operating with Chinese censorship by deleting the blog of a journalist who protested at the sacking of an editor.
The computer giant yesterday issued a statement justifying its decision to remove the web diary of the writer, known as Michael Anti, from its MSN Spaces server. “Most countries have laws and practices that require companies to make the internet safe for local users,” it said.
Michael Anti is the pseudonym of a Chinese researcher working for the New York Times’s Beijing bureau.
The name is also a pun: in Chinese, “an” means both “peace” and “security” – as in the Ministries of State and Public Security – and “ti” means “alternative”.
Like others, he has usually been careful not to antagonise the authorities too overtly.
This changed with the sacking last week of the editor and two deputy editors of the Chinese capital’s most independent newspaper, Beijing News.
He urged his readers to boycott the paper and urged its journalists to quit in protest. Discussion of events at the newspaper has been banned by the government’s propaganda department.
Internet firms have invested heavily in the Chinese market, but this has led to well-publicised compromises with government restrictions.
Mr Anti said he was “angry” at the decision to delete his entire blog, as did a member of Microsoft’s own staff.
“It’s one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs,” wrote Robert Scoble, on his own blog about working for the company.”
“It’s another to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work.”
“Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. But the behaviour of my company in this instance is not right,” he said.
