New York Times VS Chinese Internet Censorship

I read the Hao Hao Report. A website that no longer shares stories exclusively about China. I haven’t subscribed to their RSS feed for a long time, I’m not an active user. I’m not an old China hand or am I? Regardless I think that is another website that my blog outlasted. I did live in China for over four years and I still know people who do live there. I don’t know if I’ll go back to visit again anytime soon. I’m even an alumni of Tsinghua University, I’ve got the Chinese New Year’s Card to prove it.

So anyway I was looking through my RSS feeds and I clicked on a story that seemed interesting. I wanted to read more so I ended up at nytimes.com, recently in the news for their attempt to put a paywall up just for Canadians. I myself have poked fun at the New York Times on this very blog, they are a big target.

No I am not going to complain about the paywall. Newspapers need revenue to stay in business, bloggers aren’t always balanced and fair, not that newspapers are, but at least you know where to hurl the brick if you don’t like something printed in the New York Times. So anyway I’m reading the article in the New York Times on Censorship in China. An article that mentions and links to: Twitter, Google, and Facebook. I mean physically links to them in the article. So I’m enjoying the article and thinking how things have changed since I live in China. When I lived in China there were things you weren’t allowed to blog about, but I didn’t feel as though my emails, texts, and phone calls were being monitored by the government. I was invited on exchange by a famous university, I felt pretty welcome in Wu Dao Kou and most places I traveled.

Update: Times have changed, the reason for the change are smartphones and a few apps in particular. The government is definitely monitoring everything you say online even your private messages to friends in WeChat. None-the-less you must use WeChat is modern China, the vast majority of the population uses it daily and obsessively.

Back to our original narrative, I’m halfway through the article or at least have read to the end of page one and I think some of my friends on Facebook, say people who went on exchange to China as well, or who live or work there now, they might be interested in this article so I look up and down the New York Times website for a Facebook Share or Like button or perhaps a Twitter one. Finally I find a generic share button I click on it and low and behold no Facebook, no Twitter, no Google Buzz, but there is an ad. I thought to myself is the New York Times owned by Fox? As they expect me to share the article on MySpace, LinkedIn makes a bit more sense, but no options to share via the major internet services actually written about in the article.

That my friends is dumb. It is also hypocritical, they are writing on how the big bad Chinese government is censoring and blocking Google, Facebook, and Twitter and they themselves seem to be feuding with those various entities and unlike the rest of the Internet, the New York Times are making it harder for readers and potential clickers on advertisement to share stories with other readers and potential clickers on advertisements.

This is even more ironic as recently after reading an article, which is no longer online, but was shared to Twitter by Alexandra Samuel. As a result of reading this article, I changed how I had implemented sharing on Muskblog. I had previously tried AddThis and ShareDaddy but I switched to a plugin called Digg Digg. None of these seem to be under active development in 2024. The actual point? The entire world is sharing information and searching for information online and probably the three biggest tools are Google, Twitter, and Facebook, that is why the Chinese government has targeted them, but the New York Times, paragon of journalism and free speech and accountability, is basically acting like a little child by refusing to play with those three sites.

Update 2024

Maybe the New York Times was ahead of the times in removing Facebook and other like buttons as they do track people. Social media and Google also don’t compensate publishers and creators enough in the eyes of many. I removed all the social sharing buttons from my blog, because wait for it, DISQUS got blocked in China and anything blocked in China slowed down my website substantially. Now in 2024 I’m again redoing my blog’s taxonomy and I also installed W3 Total Cache which is supposed to speed up my website. We’ll see, one thing for certain China and the entire world is likely going towards more monitoring of citizens and quite possibly more censorship or at least strongly encouraging you to carefully moderate what you say online.

If you want your say online, sometimes my blog allows comments and sometimes it doesn’t because of spammers.

This entry was originaly posted on March 24th, 2011, it was last edited on May 20th, 2024 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: China, Social Media, World Wide Web.