00:22Why MSN Censorship doesn't work on me?Found

Jun

17

2005

I questioned the reports on MSN Spaces censorship in China and tested it myself. Seems like my test blog was not among those being watched. Bennett Haselton came across my post and offered a possible explanation [ Thanks a lot, Bennett]:

MSN Spaces China doesn't ban you from posting the words in the body of your blog posts, or even in the title of an individual blog post. It only bans you from putting those words into the title of your blog itself. If you sign in to MSN Spaces and edit your blog settings, you can change the title of the blog, but you can't change it to contain the banned words.

(Some reports have erroneously said that you are blocked from posting these words in the body of your blog posts, but that's not the case.)

Then I tried to change my blog title and it still worked fine. However, that's not the case in Rebecca MacKinnon's test of setting up her "own freedom loving Chinese blog". She finally succeeded by following Bennet Haselton's Freedom Hack Instructions. That explains my case: I set up the spaces using the English interface so I circumvent the censorship without knowing it even though I log in from msn.com.cn.

Portnoy has translated Bennet's instruction into Chinese.

1fishy on June 17, 2005 2:31 AM |

what I've heard is that the msn space censorship depends on the location in your space profile. if the location is within China, then the censorship works.

2Dan Li on June 17, 2005 9:09 AM |

I did try setting my location back to China and surprisingly it was automatically reset back to USA the next day.

3fishy on June 17, 2005 9:18 AM |

Maybe that setting was related to your msn passport setting, or something like that.

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