The “green” censorship joke
Posted in China Society on June 27th, 2009 by anna – Be the first to commentChina’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued in May this year a directive that all computers sold in China must install a web filter called Green Dam. The directive came secretly. Only after Wall Street Journal ran a story on it in July, did the MIIT publicize the directive on its website.
And this directive, officially to block porn content, is intended obviously to control information exchange in the public domain. It is disclosed that the filter has about 2700 words that are porn related, while it has over 6500 words that fall into the category of political censorship. The irony is that such an aggressive move to encroach public freedom of speech is termed “green” – the filter is called “Green Dam”.
The money invested in the filter is RMB41.70M, a huge sum. But the filter’s database has been cracked by netizens because of poor quality, resulting in disclosure of a list of more than a thousand porn websites. No surprise that netizens jokingly say the RMB41M taxpayers’ money was spent just to set up a pool of porn websites.
That is a joke. The whole thing is a joke.






