web censorship

Freedom of speech is a consistent controversial topic. In my own opinion, everything has both positive and negative side. In this case, the key dispute is people not clearly about the rights of to use freedom of expression and the ownership of the freedom of speech. In other words, it is the difference between the rights to give speech online and the way you give speech online.

I am not sure about the Chinese online policy, but have to say there might be some shortage of this area.

China is the largest Internet market of the world with 400 million 5 thousand 7 million Internet users. The Chinese government banned on the web pornography, gambling and criticism of the ruling Communist Party's remarks. Related to the recent event, LinkedIn web has been blocked in China till 24 hours, because of the some users give an online speech about the “jasmine revolution” in China and called everyone to participate this revolution.

Based on this event, some people will disagree with the Chinese web censorship, but in my own opinion, I think there must be a reason that leads the Chinese government doing this.

Let us leave the case for a while; let’s have a look the Chinese population, and how they affect on the online speech. There are around 1.3 billion Chinese, and as we know different people have different thought and opinion. Sometimes a rational expression of online speech will not been taken as mainstream. On the opposite, it may lead to errors in sensational views into the mainstream. In a simply way, not everyone has a rational thinking about the ongoing event. In addition to this, some people can not be rational thinking, not only because they did not know the truth of the event, but also they have the shortage of knowledge to understand the event. Sometimes people that not have properly education, will be ignorance, and will be easier to believe others’ opinions, which is negative opinion.

There still has another problem about the shortage of knowledge. When different persons are looking at the same photo, different opinions will come out, some are positive and some are not. They more like to judge the event only based on one photo. However, I have to say that, what can you see from a photo? Can you all the event background? All the culture information? Yes, all the things you can see is not comprehensive, it is very limited, and all the opinions you give out is only on one-side.

Therefore, maybe the Chinese online censorship is not properly yet, but face to its population situation, we should understand the government. In my opinion, it is the citizens’ rights to give a freedom of online speech, but it is also necessarily to censor the details of the speech in case to bring the positive effect.