My blog this week is about another censorship issue that made me feel grateful that America, though sometimes makes mistakes, feels that the Right to Information, Free Speech and Expression are important to its citizens. The article I found was on the New York Times website.
Citizens in China this week were blocked from internet sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Microsoft’s live.com. It was the governments attempt to keep citizens from being exposed to information on Thursday’s 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. The Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement was held in 1989, and at this movement hundreds of student demonstrators works and ordinary citizens were killed by the Chinese army at a political demonstration.
It is not uncommon for China’s government to censor political material on the Internet. Youtube, blogspot.com, and wordpress.com have all been blocked recently. The government has also censored the newspaper and television. An article on the Dalai Lama was removed from the English- language newspaper, The South China Morning Post, and the BBC World News reports that featured the Tiananmen anniversary were censored from the news programs in China.
The government has not stopped there. They have also arrested several political protesters during this anniversary because of a letter that was released by the protestors. These protesters had been arrested 20 years ago for involvement in Tiananmen Square demonstration. In the letter they address concern about how they experience economic hardship after they had been released from jail after their arrest.
I thought this was a great article to blog about, because it is about nothing but censorship and human rights violations. I really appreciated this article because it showed the long term affects that censorship can have. It showed that it’s not just for one day you can not log into your favorite website, The political protestors that have been arrested have been suffering for years because they tried to stand up for what they believed in.
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Jenn,
ReplyDeleteIt is unfortunate that the Chinese people are being blocked from internet sites that would give them information about the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square and of the people who lost their lives then. The political protestors who were arrested certainly have faced long term consequences for their participation in this event 20 years ago. Roger Barnes
Thanks for the information Jenn. After reading your blog, I can really appreciate living in the United States of American, the land of the free. I can only imagine what the Tianamen Square protestors are going through. I just wonder what some of us would do if our government decided to adapt those same policies.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great post. I am so grateful to live in America where I have been given the freedom to explore any subject without the fear of retribution or investigation. That being said, I believe that the restriction of information is the first step in crushing the basic freedoms that we all enjoy. Librarians are the true gardians of what keep this Country alive, the belief and obidence of ideas. I hope we see this post as an example of censorship out of control.
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