I just learned about the internet last night, as Christine Lu of the China Business Network was passing by in Shanghai, but obvious miss corporate blogging Debbie Weil did herself a major disservice during a panel performance at the recent AdTech conference in Beijing.
Debbie Weil was promoting the Chinese edition of her book on corporate blogging when a fellow panelist, Jason Ge, a vice-president of Sina.com, was attacked for the censorship practises of his weblogging hosting service. Those practises are very well documented, but Ms Weil had not done her homework very well by checking the background of her fellow panelists.
From China Digital Times reports on what kind of messages internet users get from Sina, after their messages are deleted:
Number 33721 user, please pay attention. You have violated the Regulation on Internet Security and Management of the People's Republic of China. Your IP is under surveillance now. Please do not publish such posts which contains reactionary or anti-China content. Otherwise, we will work with China Internet Monitoring agencies to adopt unconventional measures."As a part of their defence, Sina does not answer questions from bloggers, but only from the tightly controlled traditional media. When Sina's Jason Ge was attacked, Debbie Weil defended him and agreed with his policy of not talking to webloggers. Lonnie Hodge recalls the incident today in Facebook.
It struck me as incredible irony that Sina was on the panel discussing corporate blogging when their VP was refusing interviews with anyone but mainstream media...And Debbie, woefully ignorant of the challenges facing bloggers here who blindly backed up the move, should have been pimping her book in a keynote address instead of sharing a condescending "Wu ai ni ZhongGuo" with an audience mostly from a country she had resided in a total of three days....Sometimes I see lots of gray between black and white. Not here.
3 comments:
Since I don't believe you attended the ad-tech beijing event, your unpleasant post doesn't really make much sense. You missed the, er, nuances.
I'm quite well aware that things in China are complicated, that censorship is a gray area (and can be unpredictable) and that all is often not as it seems.
Unfortunately, it is ad hominem attacks like yours that make bloggers untrustworthy and not credible. And that is what I was thinking of when I appeared to "agree" with Jason Ge and his CEO who were, apparently, refusing interviews from some bloggers. Of course I don't support censorship.
Setting up a conversation is key when you are in this business. Blocking access, in any way, is not something that should be promoted.
Debbie,
I was at the panel session and I did not miss a word of it. And there were no nuances in your culturally insensitive and socially inappropriate self-promotional actions and statements.
Sina did not reject interviews with "some" bloggers, they refused any contact with writers outside of "mainstream media".
The bloggers at that conference like my ]self and Danwei TV are seasoned writers who do a much better job of fairly reporting a story as do some of the hacks in your journalistic circles. You implication that bloggers, because they are not "trained journalists" (your words!),is offensive, arrogant and thankfully so stupid it is laughable.
It is not an "ad hominem" attack if we are reporting that you are simply out of touch with the consequences of your actions and don't want us to inform folks you are a living media anachronism.
Censorship is neither complicated nor gray in China: It is rampant and invoked often and without remorse by those fearful of government reprisal. Sites, are routinely "harmonized" for slight infractions. Bloggers have been detained, jailed and sent into exile--fully supported by US corporate who fund you like Google, Yahoo! and Cisco--for benign violations of the unwritten rules of social engagement here.
To give your tacit, nuanced or direct support of any effort to silence any voice here is to give credence to censorship. You did not appear to agree with Jason--that is euphemistic--you openly stated that that he was right to deny blogger access as it was "dangerous".
I take offense at any tacit or implied attacks on those bloggers here who risk freedom to report on the truth.
You, as an American and alleged journalist, should know better.
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