The Victory of Chinese Netizens over the Green Dam Filter

Hong Kong.
We move on to Hu Yong as the next speaker at The Internet Turning 40, who highlights the anti-Green Dam movement in China which opposes Internet censorship. In June 2009, the Chinese government introduced regulation that from 1 July that year, it required each new computer to have the 'Green Dam Youth Escort' filtering software pre-installed, which would filter specific 'unhealthy' - pornographic - Websites and information (previously it had been thought that this software was only required for school computers).

The Chinese media did not pay any attention to the directives - it was a Wall Street Journal article which first highlighted this development, and this ultimately led to significant opposition. Users claimed that the software contained serious security loopholes, that it was insufficient for its task, that only 15% of the keywords it would filter were pornographic in nature, that it would filter images which had the right colour ratios, but were not at all pornographic in nature (such as cartoons or images of pigs, for example), and that it was unable to filter videos altogether. All of this was identified in short time through a collaborative user effort, and the results (lists of filtered keywords and sites, for example) were shared online.

Netizens condemned the restriction of freedom of speech, the intrusion into personal computers as private property, and the waste of taxpayers' money; in response, the Chinese government required media to report positively about the Green Dam software, and social networking services had to shut down anti-Green Dam groups. Netizens are now engaging in spoofing activities, parodying the Green Dam logo and advertising imagery to give it sexual meaning and creating the Green Dam Girl cartoon as an anti-Green Dam mascot (she even has a theme song...). There is also an official anti-Green Dam Website which collected more than 10,000 signatures of Green Dam opponents, and various networking tools (such as Twitter) are being used to mobilise opposition.

Eventually, the Chinese government caved in and dropped the Green Dam project - and Netizens created a poster which reverses the imagery of the Tian An Men 'tank man' to show the government as overwhelmed by an endless parade of tank-like computer mice rolling towards it.

Technorati : China, Green Dam, Internet Turning 40, Netizens, censorship, filter, protest
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