Inside China's censorship factories, where young censors learn to erase history

[xeni]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/03/china-censorship-business.html

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[FGD135]

Hopefully, some of the trainees will end up being dissidents after they have learned what nobody is supposed to know.

[gracchus]

There’s a good chance that whichever member of the 50 Cent Army shows up in this topic to deny and/or defend this practise will have spent some part of his illustrious career working for the censorship apparatus as well.

[Otherbrother]

I’ll bet they don’t even get the cool pneumatic tube delivery system or slick wood-trimmed data consoles that were promised to us in “1984.”

[Boundegar]

You mean Brazil?

[KathyPartdeux]

Erased? History has been expertly curated.

[Hummmm]

Is their motto “Truth isn’t truth” ?

[xhonk]

Maybe I’m just too sugar-addled from holiday leftovers to understand the difference, but how is digital censorship of specific historical topics qualitatively or functionally different than 1) Facebook and Googles’ attempts to enforce real names for all users, 2) educational material battles fought by dark monied revisionists to recast motives and outcomes, or 3) relying on opaque, hopelessly dense, and binding terms of service for the usage of these various privately-held media monopolies?

[Bunbain]

Ah, professional censors, that’s what they were planning on doing with all the workers replaced by robots.

[RobJ]

I work in software localization and Beyondsoft is one of our suppliers of translations. Wonder if it’s time to re-examine our relationship before we send them any of our, uh, content for, um, review.

[RickMycroft]

But at least the chocolate ration has been increased!

[GagHalfrunt]

@xhonk

Maybe I’m just too sugar-addled from holiday leftovers to understand the difference, but how is digital censorship of specific historical topics qualitatively or functionally different than 1) Facebook and Googles’ attempts to enforce real names for all users, 2) educational material battles fought by dark monied revisionists to recast motives and outcomes, or 3) relying on opaque, hopelessly dense, and binding terms of service for the usage of these various privately-held media monopolies?

Dark monied American revisionists fight to censor school textbooks. Chinese government censors have control over all books, newspapers, radio, television, ffilm, theatre, music, websites, etc.

[the_borderer]

Hopefully it will end better than Nineteen Eighty-Four did.

[FGD135]

[Melted_Crayons]

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.”

[white_noise]

Don’t worry, any concern about practices like this can be completely dismissed with the words “Freeze Peach”.