China Censorship 2.0 extends to twitters

Posted by: Frederik Balfour on July 17, 2008

The long arm of China’s censorship, it seems, now even extends even to Twitters. According to a video interview with prominent blogger Oiwan Lam, China’s thought police have monitored twitter postings of some of her friends, forcing them to limit access to their twitterings, thereby limiting their impact.

She points out, however that the government’s 50 Cent Party, estimated by David Bandurski in Far Eastern Economic Review to be 280,000 strong, has not been able to infiltrate twitters with the same success that it’s had with blogs, forums and chat rooms.

By the way, the 50 Cent brigade has nothing to do with the rapper by the same name, rather it applies to a group of individuals, ranging from party cadres to journalists to individual bloggers for hire, who are paid 50 fen, or half a yuan [ about 7 U.S. cents]for every posting they put on the internet. Here’s what Bandurski says about the 50 Cent Party:

“They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,” the “red vests” and the “red vanguard.” But China’s growing armies of Web commentators—instigated, trained and financed by party organizations—have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the Communist Party by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing Chinese Internet. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing pro-Party views through chat rooms and Web forums, reporting dangerous content to authorities.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as 280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious China’s leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More importantly, they offer tangible clues about China’s next generation of information controls—what President Hu Jintao last month called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

It was around 2005 that party leaders started getting more creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet…

As my Beijing colleague Dexter Roberts has pointed out in a BusinessWeek article, corporations including Pepsi, Nike and McDonalds have used blogging [words “paid bloggers” removed in response to comment from CIC]to help them win the hearts and minds of consumers.

A hat tip here to blogger and twitterer Thomas Crampton , {he posted the Oiwan Lam Video) for twigging me to the term “astroturfing” which according to wikipedia is “a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising which seek to create the impression of being spontaneous, grassroots behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass AstroTurf.”