Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Scobleizer dissapointed with Microsoft

Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most famous blogger is dissapointed with his company for censoring a Chinese blogger. Zhao Jing aka Michael Anti's blog at MSN Spaces was taken down by MSN. From Scobleizer:
It’s one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right....

Oh, and to: Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti I’d like to offer you a guest blog here on my blog. I won’t censor you and you can write whatever you’d like.

Guys over at MSN: sorry, I don’t agree with your being used as a state-run thug.
I agree with Scoble on this but it is indeed difficult when you are dealing with a country like China. As much as you do not want your company to help censor political views, the company if it wants to do business in China, has a responsibility to listen to what the Chinese government wants. And we all know what China wants which is to censor those who are opposed to its policies and ruling. Will Scoble's bosses listen? Will they risk the potential of millions and billions in China for the sake of one Chinese blogger? I don't think so.

BoingBoing has more on this.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i believe chinese officials may have wrote to the very top at MSN Spaces to inform them of the blog.

n i do not think that any company doing business with china would say no to the govt officials.

Anonymous said...

Worthy effort by Scoble but doubt Bill Gates and company will listen.

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