Tactic: using MSN Chat logo to show China pride

Written by Mary on May 5, 2008 – 2:19 pm -

striaticDescription: Users of MSN chat in China are adding a red heart to their MSN names (see image left) to demonstrate their support for China and the Olympics.

Organizer: Unknown but has official support from Microsoft. Appeal asking “Chinese people worldwide to use the red heart to express their love for China and to support Beijing’s Olympic Games” appeared on the Chinese MSN homepage.

Purpose of Action: Many Chinese feel under attack from France and CNN because the West “supports” Tibetan independence and is “anti-China” and “anti-Olympics.”

Organizing tools used: instant messaging (MSN chat)

Outcome: 7,000,000 people have added the little red heart to their MSN names over the past week.

Ease of Replication: Adding a logo to your MSN chat is very easy. GChat also allows using to add their own image/logo.

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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 | 1 Comment »

Tactics: Tibetans Get the News Out Despite Media Censorship

Written by Mary on March 16, 2008 – 5:31 am -

Description: Last week hundreds of Tibetan monks took to the streets in and near the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to protest Chinese rule. Although the heavily censored Chinese media refused to cover the story, both Tibetans and foreign tourists used the Internet to get the news out. According to the Vancouver Sun, “Amateur cellphone photos and video clips showing what were described as confrontations between police and Tibetans protesting Chinese rule poured onto websites big and small, including those for major news media, Tibetan rights groups and tourist blogs.”

Organizer: unclear

Purpose of Action: To protest Chinese rule of Tibet.

Organizing Tools: e-mail, digital photos, mainstream media sites that accept user-generated content (like BBC), web sites of sympathetic NGOs, travel blogs of tourists, cell phone video uploaded to YouTube.com,

Outcome: Bringing global attention to protests that the Chinese government would prefer to silence.

Ease of Replication: Unless the government shuts down the Internet, as occurred during the recent protests in Burma, using individual e-mail accounts, cell phones, and blogs to distribute information and images is an effective way to get around domestic media censorship.

cell phone image of protests published on the site of a Tibetan rights NGO based in India

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Posted in Asia, Blogs, Digital Images, Tactics | 2 Comments »