Little Sister Is Watching

[PalePhoenix]

When you can get Google to grovel, you know you're a player. It's just a pity that neither the country nor the company appear to understand the game:

Quote:

As Chinese Students Go Online, Little Sister Is Watching (click for full article - NYT) To her fellow students, Hu Yingying appears to be a typical undergraduate, plain of dress, quick with a smile and perhaps possessed with a little extra spring in her step, but otherwise decidedly ordinary. And for Ms. Hu, a sophomore at Shanghai Normal University, coming across as ordinary is just fine, given the parallel life she leads. For several hours each week she repairs to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers, where she logs in unsuspected by other students to help police her school's Internet forums. Once online, following suggestions from professors or older students, she introduces politically correct or innocuous themes for discussion. Recently, she says, she started a discussion of what celebrities make the best role models, a topic suggested by a professor as appropriate. Politics, even school politics, is banned on university bulletin boards like these. Ms. Hu says she and her fellow moderators try to steer what they consider negative conversations in a positive direction with well-placed comments of their own. Anything they deem offensive, she says, they report to the school's Web master for deletion. During some heated anti-Japanese demonstrations last year, for example, moderators intervened to cool nationalist passions, encouraging students to mute criticisms of Japan. Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator—and all without the knowledge of her fellow students—Ms. Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet. For years China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who troll online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Communist Party or antisocial speech. But Ms. Hu, one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of force, an ostensibly all-volunteer one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web. In April that effort was named "Let the Winds of a Civilized Internet Blow," and it is part of a broader "socialist morality" campaign, known as the Eight Honors and Disgraces, begun by the country's leadership to reinforce social and political control. Under the Civilized Internet program, service providers and other companies have been asked to purge their servers of offensive content, which ranges from pornography to anything that smacks of overt political criticism or dissent. Chinese authorities say that more than two million supposedly "unhealthy" images have already been deleted under this campaign, and more than 600 supposedly "unhealthy" Internet forums shut down. Having started its own ambitious Internet censorship efforts—a "harmful-information defense system," as the university calls it—long before the government's latest campaign, Shanghai Normal University is promoting itself within the education establishment as a pioneer. Although most of its students know nothing of the university's monitoring efforts, Shanghai Normal has conducted seminars for dozens of Chinese universities and education officials on how to tame the Web. Nevertheless, school officials were not eager to talk about the program. "Our system is not very mature, and since we've just started operating it there's not much to say about it" said Li Ximeng, deputy director of the school's propaganda department. "Our system is not open for media, and we don't want to have it appear in the news or be publicized." For her part, Ms. Hu beams with pride over her contribution toward building a "harmonious society." "We don't control things, but we really don't want bad or wrong things to appear on the Web sites," she said. "According to our social and educational systems, we should judge what is right and wrong. And as I'm a student cadre, I need to play a pioneer role among other students, to express my opinion, to make stronger my belief in Communism." While the national Web censorship campaign all but requires companies to demonstrate their vigilance against what the government deems harmful information, the new censorship drive on college campuses shows greater subtlety and, some would say, greater deviousness.

Lotsa 'trigger words' in that article, at least for me. Harmonious, normal, harmful information. I'm reproducing a topic from my own board, because I thought it would be a better subject for TAZ. What's harmful information? If the program's so good, why don't the other students know it's happening? And let me not forget to underscore just how creepy it is that they hire other college students--children, really--to gleefully spy on and serve as plants among their peers. You thought being a Mod, or having to ban people, was tough in the West? Try it somewhere that gets you jailed for ten years. Guess Ms. Hu won't be invited to the next Ice Cream Social.

How much longer can they expect to continue this? The world weighs heavily on their doorstep, and with the amount of resources China is beginning to consume, they cannot forever stem the flow of information. Recruiting indoctrinated youngsters to do their bidding is reprehensible, but it is clever. At least they've caught on to the "forum trend."

The winds of a civilized Internet blow, indeed.

[AzhriaLilu]

I think it shows the way society - and I use the term loosely - is progressing. What do they think they are teaching children by doing this? Kids can be bad enough without being given more ideas on how to make their peers lives miserable.