The Globalization of CensorshipThese days, greed and fear often trump companies' commitment to free speech.
Posted Monday, Sept. 14, 2009, at 8:00 PM ET
Item 1: When it appears in the coming months, look carefully through Yale University Press' new book The Cartoons That Shook the World. It is a scholarly account of the controversy that surrounded a Danish newspaper's 2005 publication of 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The author, Jytte Klausen, argues, among other things, that the controversy was manipulated by Danish imams who showed their followers false, sexually offensive depictions of Mohammed alongside the real ones, which were not inherently offensive. She consulted with several Muslim scholars, who agreed. Nevertheless, you will not find the cartoons themselves printed in the finished book.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponItem 2: Pick up a copy of the U.S. edition of September's GQ. Buried deep inside, you will find an article titled "Vladimir Putin's Dark Rise to Power," by Scott Anderson. The article, based on extensive reporting, argues that Russian security services helped create a series of bomb explosions in Moscow in 2000—explosions that were blamed on Chechen terrorists at the time. Read it carefully, for you will not find this article in GQ's Russian edition. As of this writing, you will not find this article on GQ's Web site, either: Condé Nast, the media company that owns GQ, has ordered all its magazines and affiliates around the world to refrain from mentioning or promoting this article in any way.
Item 3: If your knowledge of written Chinese characters is up to it, type the word Tiananmen into Google.cn. I am reliably informed (not knowing Chinese myself) that your search will retrieve little or no useful information on this subject, nor will it tell you much about Taiwan or Tibet or democracy. This is not an accident: In 2006, Google agreed to a modicum of censorship in China, in exchange for being allowed to operate there at all.
These three incidents are not identical. Yale's press refused to print the cartoons because the university fears retaliatory violence on its campus. Condé Nast refused to promote an article on the Russian secret service because it fears loss of Russian advertisers. Google refuses to let its Chinese users search for Tiananmen and other taboo subjects because Google wants to compete against Chinese search engines for a share of the huge Chinese market. All three companies exhibit greatly varying degrees of remorse, from Condé Nast (none) to Yale's press (a lot) to Google (ambivalent: Google founder Sergey Brin initially argued that the company would at least bring more information to China, if not complete information).
Nevertheless, the three stories lead to one conclusion: In different ways, the Russian government, the Chinese government, and unnamed Islamic terrorists are now capable of placing de facto controls on American companies—something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In a world that seems more dangerous and less profitable than it did in the past, greed or fear proved stronger than these companies' commitment to free speech.
By caving in to pressure, they have not made the world a safer place, however, either for themselves or for anyone else. Google's submission to Chinese censorship in 2006 has not prevented the Chinese government from continuing to harass the company, allegedly for distributing pornography. On the contrary, it may have encouraged China to attempt, quite recently, to force companies to place filters on all computers sold in the country. By the same token, Condé Nast's climb-down will only encourage Russian companies—many of which are de facto state-owned—to exert pressure on their Western partners, making it harder for others to publish controversial material about Russia in the future. The fact that Yale's press, one of the most innovative in the country, will not publish the Danish cartoons only makes it harder for others to publish them. (Declaration of interest: I am editing an anthology for YUP and have long admired its commitment to opening Soviet archives.)
In fact, each time an American company caves in to illiberal pressure, the atmosphere is worse for everyone else. Each alteration made in the name of placating an illiberal group or government makes that group or government stronger. What seems a small lapse of integrity now might well loom larger in the future. All these companies are making it much harder for everyone else to continue speaking and publishing freely around the world.
There is no law or edict that can force these companies, or any American companies, to abide by the principles of free speech abroad. But at least it is possible to embarrass them at home. Hence this column.
Is It More Important for Your Turkey To Be Organic or Local?
Why Gift Cards Are a Terrible Gift
Is Sarah Palin's Approval Rating Really as High as Barack Obama's?
Justice Scalia's Most Eccentric Habits
How Do You Know Whether a Sleepwalking Murderer Was Really Asleep?
Democrats Have a Lot To Be Thankful For
Google gets a lot of flak for its operations in China, and perhaps rightly so. No one can seriously countenance the argument that the company will play a positive role in slowly dismantling Chinese censorship or offering Chinese people access to any more information than the government wants or allows them to see. Censorship has won in China. PRC citizens generally have become too cynical and self-concerned, too childishly "sensitive" to perceived criticism from outside of China to care about the truth. And new technologies will be brought to bear to ensure that censorship's victory is permanent. Google accounts for only a small minority of searches performed by Chinese citizens (about 15-20%), and its market share has been stripped away by a despicably nationalistic and obsequious company (BaiDu) which brands itself not as a better search engine, but a better search engine "for Chinese People". Google's image search in China is utterly useless, with approximately 80% of the (thoroughly innocuous) images restricted from view and the additional remainder prone to disruption. YouTube is just completely blocked.
But the environment Google operates in is atrocious. The problem is not just that information the search engine carries may be prescriptively labeled "sensitive" and therefore prohibited; the problem is that anything, whether for reasons of nationalistic sentiment or government anxiety, may be manipulated into a "sensitive" or critical issue at any time, with all of the government harassment and public relations issue that such an event might entail. It is this effect of China's media control, evidenced by Dell's problems in 2005, Nike's in 2006, which leads one to believe foreign companies operate in China under perpetual extortion--the nebulous but persistent threat of infraction leading them to censor themselves. After all, if they run afoul of nationalistic sentiments or government rhetoric, they have no opportunity to present their case to the Chinese people. The PRC media is cynically deployed to serve the interests of both domestic companies like Lenovo and LiNing, as well as the government itself--as such, it will deemphasize or entirely omit any inconvenient fact (such as Nike's disclosure that its "offensive" commercials were made by a Chinese company; or the fact that Lenovo is partially owned by the Chinese government). This is how twisted the system is. I suppose one could argue the companies should have never entered the market in the first place, but that won't get us anywhere.
The crux of issue is this: Censorship is not exported by Google to China. It is exported by the Chinese government (among others) and China's domestic conditions to the rest of the world. When a company's success while operating in China is partially held hostage, when any action associated with that company around the world could conceivably be viewed as an insult to Chinese nationalism, ample pressure (both internal and external) will be put on companies to restrict not only their actions within the domestically censored market, but also beyond. And since PR and marketing officials working for these companies are scared shitless by hostility flying from all angles, they're not going to release the dirt necessary to assess the parameters of this censorship and find a way to oppose it.
Here's what I suggest in response: Don't try to embarrass them at home. Companies must be made to believe they have been insulated against repercussions in order to aggressively address this problem. No matter what you think about the devolution that constitutes their self-censorship, they're neither the cause nor the solution to this problem. Don't expect Google to mount a protest in China. It won't happen. While holding such companies to a higher standard is admirable, holding the PRC to a lower standard is appalling and destructive. A better tactic would be to interview PR and marketing officials who formerly worked for embattled companies in markets like the PRC. Perhaps even ones who work for a competing company without as much exposure today. Since it is no longer in their interest to minimize the extent and damage of such censorship, they might be more revealing about the conditions such companies operate under. And, if one can somehow bypass the confidentiality agreements they may have been asked to sign upon their departure, they may be willing to utilize their knowledge and experience to make tangible gains in the fight against censorship. That, in my view, is entirely the job of an avowedly free media. Protect and, if necessary, cautiously obscure your sources. Make it harder, not easier, for retribution to be waged against these companies. Then you can more cogently present the facts of the case.
-- Lethe
(To reply, click here)