Tactic: Temporary Posting to Avoid Censorship

Written by Mary on April 8, 2008 – 8:23 pm -

IMPORTANT NOTE: The security situation is each country is unique. Please consider the specific security environment in your own country when deciding whether to use the advice in this section.

Threat: Bloggers who publish content critical of the government risk having their blogs blocked by the government if they live in a country with limited freedom of expression.

Way to Protect Yourself: To make it more difficult for the censors to find sensitive content on your blog, only post the content for a few hours and then take it down. This temporary posting gives the censor a smaller window of time to find this content on your site and thus makes it less likely that you will be blocked, while also giving readers enough time to copy and paste the information from your blog onto bulletin board systems and chat rooms for wider discussion.

How Activists Are Using This Technique: When news of the Tibet protests broke, Bei Feng, editor of one of “China’s ten most influential” web portals, only posted information about the protests on his blog for a few hours, which gave his readers enough time to copy the information onto other sites but prevented his blog from being blocked. This is a strategy that “he commonly uses for sensitive issues, posting a story about it on his blog and then taking it off after only a few hours to avoid being shut down by censors.” (source: openDemocracy)


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Posted in Asia, Blogs, Tactics |


One Response to “Tactic: Temporary Posting to Avoid Censorship”

  1. By Thiz 'n' Dat on Apr 11, 2008 | Reply

    Were you aware of the Kathleen Seidel case in the US? She expressed an opinion at her blog that someone involved with a lawsuit didn’t like. Within four hours she was served an excessively burdensome subpoena (asking for things such as ALL her email AND verbal correspondence with each and every single one of the 100+ bloggers in her blog roll, all going back umpteem years… and that’s just the START of what they’re demanding). She has no connection to the case, she simply commented on it. They’re clearly using this as a pressure tactic to get her to stop blogging about the case. Read more at:

    http://thizndat.blogspot.com/2008/04/i-am-kathleen-freedom-of-speech.html

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