【2010.3.29 New Yorker】Chilling Effects

和解团结

【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/online/ ... illing-effects.html
【作者】Evan Osnos

【原文】


One of the central arguments offered by China’s official technologists is that Google is being hypocritical: in the U.S. and other countries, they say, Google routinely coöperates with the government to censor objectionable material, and they cite as examples child pornography in the U.S. and Nazi rhetoric in Germany. But some key details seem to be getting muddled. For instance, Professor Fang Binxing, the president of Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications and a top technology-policy adviser, made the following point on state television last week:

    Internet censorship actually exists all over the world. Google conducts a program [in the U.S.] called “Chilling Effects”… What is the program? Every organization, including government agencies, can complain to the “Chilling Effects” group by identifying information that is hazardous, saying you can not allow it to appear again, such as child pornography or racial hatred or defamation…. Then this organization, with universities and organizations involved to help judge, will put it in a database and submit that to Google. If they think you are right, then Google will filter out that information. And if you search for it again, you will find some of the search results—thanks to the “Chilling Effects” program—will not be displayed.

(Thanks to Biganzi for tipping me off to the show.) So, what is the “Chilling Effects” program that he is talking about? From what I can tell, it is precisely the opposite of the description above. The “Chilling Effect Clearinghouse” is a Web site developed at Harvard and supported by a consortium of law schools, with the expressed intent to protect online free speech by studying how cease-and-desist letters can have a “chilling effect” on online expression. As the site puts it, their aim is to “educate C&D [cease and desist] recipients about their legal rights”—to deter censorship, not encourage it.

So what’s the point? Fact-checking a state-television show would hardly seem worth the time if the effects of this counterfactual narrative were not so far-reaching. A reasonable Chinese viewer—exactly the kind of person who is defining Chinese public opinion—would watch this and come away convinced that the American “Chilling Effects” program described in the show is a close cousin of China’s censorship practices. In other words, it would chill any effort to oppose them. Moreover, I wonder what this says about the decision-making apparatus. Do some of China’s top technology-policy planners really misunderstand the state of play in the West? Probably not, but, frankly, I don’t know, and I welcome thoughts on this question.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/ ... .html#ixzz0jqyhFPaq

和解团结

认领了

下个月

http://bbs.m4.cn/thread-235191-1-1.html链接