censorship | MUSEUM FATIGUE

“Liu Xiaobo” and the Power and Weakness of the Digital

July 14, 2017 by Museum Fatigue

char nametoberemoved[11] = {‘L’, ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘ ‘, ‘X’, ‘i’,’a’, ‘o’, ‘b’, ‘o’, ‘\0’}; When he died yesterday, Liu Xiaobo got quite a lot of press in the West. A Nobel Peace Prize winner and notable participant in the Tiananmen protests that culminated in the events of June 4th, 1989, he was an iconic dissident figure. In fact, I have a hunch that when we look back from some future point, Liu Xiaobo’s passing will have also marked the eclipsing […]

Categories: China, Memory, Technology • Tags: censorship, Digital Culture, Liu Xiaobo, WeChat

What Weibo Wipes: A Collection of Censored Images

November 17, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Sometime this last week a colleague shared a link to a very interesting collection of images erased from the Weibo microblogging website (“China’s Twitter”). The collection is being made by ProPublica and also includes some very interesting related articles about online censorship in China, such as “How to Get Censored on China’s Twitter.” I saved the link and didn’t really get a chance to look through it until last night. What an interesting collection it is—and most of the images have basic […]

Categories: China, Internet, Scripts, Surveillance, Visual Anthropology • Tags: censorship, censorship in China, ProPublica, social web, Weibo

Tom Skype’s Sensitive Words: A Trove of Keywords for Contemporary China

March 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

In China, pretty much everyone knows that the Internet is heavily policed. The people know. The government knows the people know. The people know the government knows the people know. In fact, the “open secret” of the Great Firewall is surely an important part of the way censorship works in China. Precisely because people know Internet censorship exists, the party-state benefits from the efficiency of self-policing as a means of control rather than relying exclusively on external enforcement in real […]

Categories: China, Discipline, Internet, Language, Scripts, Surveillance • Tags: censorship, internet, language, sensitive words, Skype, technology, 敏感词