My position on the expansion of fair use to cover all non-commercial copying is premised largely on the need for a censorship-free internet as a vital tool for keeping humanity from self-destructing in the future.
So occasionally I'll be talking about new censorship initiatives (whether labeled as such or not) in order to underscore the its insidious nature, both in its effects and in how subtly it can be done--so that people don't even see it for what it is.
If this ibtimes article is true, the Chinese (second only to the U.S. of fuckin A. in internet censorship technology)(my God, how have we allowed this to happen?) ...have come up with a bizarre new way of censoring their twitter/facebook equivalents. Basically they are assigning "points" based on how conforming to official policy your statements on the internet are.
And yes, they have armies of censors sitting at computers all day doing these ratings.
The article covers some important and interesting detail and is worth a read. But one aspect of it startles me--if I'm a Chinese person looking for "bad" information, wouldn't it be simplest to trust users with low "government approved" ratings?
But of course, it is dangerous to associate with those people--which is precisely the intimidation the Chinese government intends.
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