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from the keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer dept.
The New York Times has an article about China's online censorship factories and how they operate. Censors are specially educated accurately in history and politics so that they have mastery over how to spot and eliminate references, even indirect ones, to forbidden topics. Potential employees for censorship factories have to cram for two weeks for a comprehensive exam which they must pass in order to begin work. This education is followed by ongoing training which includes regularly visiting and reviewing web sites normally blocked by the Great Firewall of China.
Li Chengzhi had a lot to learn when he first got a job as a professional censor.
Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.
Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.
Previously:
Censorship a Trojan Horse (2018)
Unpublished Chinese Censorship Document Reveals Effort to Eradicate Online Political Content (2018)
The "Great Cannon" of China (2015)
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:35PM (2 children)
We watched Katyń last night. Kind of a depressing film, but interesting to see how first the Germans used the news of the massacre of Polish officers as propaganda, and then the Soviets did, blaming the massacre on the Germans.
For nearly 50 years, if you mentioned that a Polish officer was killed in the Katyń forest in 1940, that would be censored. There's a scene in the film where a tombstone is smashed to bits for having the "wrong" date of death. You see, the Germans didn't control the territory the forest was in until April 1941, so there is no way such an officer could have been killed in 1940, it must have been in 1941.
Finally in 1990 Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre for the first time.
The truth will get out. Eventually, hopefully.
(Score: 2) by DavePolaschek on Tuesday January 08 2019, @02:36PM (1 child)
Oops. Included the URL, but it got stripped because I did it wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyń_(film) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday January 09 2019, @09:39PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre#Western_response [wikipedia.org]
Whole lot of fake news here. It talk about a Soviet genocide of Poland and we all know for a fact that communists never genocided anybody.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam