Proud to be an American?

Our class blog, Press Control Shift, there is a post "E-Repression" highlighting a report on Internet censorship in China released by the OpenNet Initiative. The Chinese government has successfully filtered search engines from looking up keywords including: Tiananmen Square , Democracy, anti-communist movements, and Taiwanese and Tibetan independence.

Now the censorship in China is getting national news attention. A CNN.com article "Democracy a 'Bad Word'," describes how Microsoft's new China based web portal provides a scolding message each time a user attempts to look up a keyword that is not approved by the government. "Prohibited Message in Text- Please Delete" the pop-up message reads. Microsoft is cooperating with the Chinese government to provide this censorship of politically sensitive words, obscenities, and sexual references.

The web portal also allows for users to create their own blogs. Currently, 5 million blogs have been created using the China based portal. The Chinese government only encourages people to use the Internet for business and education and are censoring any blog on a politically sensitive topic.

As companies are expanding all over the world should they be expected to promote democracy and freedom of speech? To be honest I find it horrible that an American based company is cooperating with the Chinese government to promote censorship. I know that by creating a web portal in China they could potentially be getting millions of new customers, but with these new customers they are showing that American values are expendable. I feel that American companies should share our values across the world and not give them up for customers.