Fergie's Tech Blog

MSN Spaces bans "Democracy" and "freedom" for China users

Xeni Jardin writes over on Boing Boing:

Snipped from the FT:

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors. Users of the joint-venture portal, formally launched last month, have been blocked from using a range of potentially sensitive words to label personal websites they create using its free online blog service, MSN Spaces.

Attempts to input words in Chinese such as "democracy" prompted an error message from the site: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item." Other phrases banned included the Chinese for "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence".

Link. Regular Boing Boing readers know a thing or two about this topic: Seven Dirty Blogs

posted by Fergie @ 6/13/2005 07:17:00 AM