<story><title>China drops Dropbox</title><url>http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=19835</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaidf</author><text>Chinese gov is ridiculous. My girlfriend made a one word posting on the Chinese clone of facebook that read &quot;freedom&quot;. The post disappeared in minutes and she received a private message warning her that her account may be deleted if she continues making such posts.&lt;p&gt;One upside is that Chinese people seem to be a little more tech savvy. ie. many of them are forced to learn about proxy servers so they can go around the blocking.&lt;p&gt;Edit: By Chinese facebook, I meant the Chinese CLONE of facebook. Facebook itself is totally blocked in China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshwa</author><text>One common misconception is that all censorship is done automatically based on keywords. While it&apos;s true that internet searches in particular, and visits to banned websites are greeted with a connection reset, the censorship of message boards is done by hordes of low-paid individual workers (the &quot;50-cent party&quot; [1]) that are local to each district. Your girlfriend&apos;s post (which was a one-word post, and an inflammatory one at that) was probably spotted by whichever worker(s) were responsible for monitoring that message board.&lt;p&gt;When such a post is removed, it&apos;s typically referred to by netizens as being &quot;harmonized&quot;, a play on Hu Jintao&apos;s &quot;Harmonious Society&quot; slogan [2].&lt;p&gt;You should check out the archives of a site like chinasmack or chinahush[3], who have translated summaries of popular chinese message board topics and gives a good feel of the day-to-day life of a chinese netizen.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious_Society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;http://chinasmack.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://chinasmack.com&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chinahush.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://chinahush.com&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>China drops Dropbox</title><url>http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=19835</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaidf</author><text>Chinese gov is ridiculous. My girlfriend made a one word posting on the Chinese clone of facebook that read &quot;freedom&quot;. The post disappeared in minutes and she received a private message warning her that her account may be deleted if she continues making such posts.&lt;p&gt;One upside is that Chinese people seem to be a little more tech savvy. ie. many of them are forced to learn about proxy servers so they can go around the blocking.&lt;p&gt;Edit: By Chinese facebook, I meant the Chinese CLONE of facebook. Facebook itself is totally blocked in China.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kurumo</author><text>I guess Chinese Newspeak doesn&apos;t have &quot;freedom&quot; in it.
And I thought 1984 was bad :(</text></comment>