Is China Banning Submissions to Digg?
China has a documented history of banning various popular websites to keep its people from ‘viewing harmful information’.
YouTube, Google, and CNN have been banned for some time, but with the recent riots in Urumqui, Facebook and Twitter were also banned in what seems like an an effort to keep reports of the riots from getting out.
Now there are reports coming in from some Chinese Diggers, like Tony, that they are no longer able to submit content to the popular social news site Digg. Although they are not receiving the Green Dam messages or the common ‘website not available’ errors, they are unable to use the submission process.
When attempting to submit content, the process simply hangs for hours on end, never completing or allowing the submission to occur.
Digg has not been available to confirm or deny whether any submissions are making it into the system from China, and I will make sure to update this post when I get word from them.
I was able to get the following information from Jen Burton at Digg about the possible problem, although they are still looking into the issue to determine the true cause:
“I believe this situation is likely a combination of two factors: occasionally, the Chinese government blocks some sites which means we can’t crawl it as part of our submission process & we’re still making tweaks to our new dupe detection engine which may have a bug related to the time out process when digging through a submission.”
Note that the above explanation makes some sense, but I have to wonder that anyone submitting content that is banned, would have a hard time visiting the banned page to even begin the submission process. There definitely appears to be something more to this issue.
China has long desired the ability to completely censor the internet and has taken steps to require the installation of the Green Dam, a website filtering software, on all computers sold after July 1, 2009.
Although the software claims to allow parents to set which sites, or types of sites, are blocked, research at the University of Michigan found that it was also censoring many sites that used the phrase ‘Falun Gong’, a religious movement the Chinese has branded as a cult, and many other terms it would like to censor.
When visiting a potentially ‘unhealthy’ site, the user would be presented this message, which requires a password to view.
Although it is unfortunate that China has decided to ban so many news related sites, it is clear that they have learned the usefulness of sites like Digg, Twitter, and Facebook for getting the message visible to the whole world.
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11 Responses to “Is China Banning Submissions to Digg?”
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I guess Digg censors for the Chines regime. They censor all the time SEO sites for instance so it would come as no surprise.
I always new Hu Jintao was a reddit user!…but in all seriousness, it’s a shame china is so hell bent of restricting the flow of information to and from its citizens. I hope the government will come to understand that progress and innovation will only flourish when there is no censorship.
Thanks for posting this. I had trouble digging some pages, and now I know that I am not the only one. For what it is worth, here in Beijing (I heard the censoring is dependent on where in China you are) it is not possible at this moment to submit a link to Digg to a site that is blocked. Sites that are not blocked can be dugg, though.
I have to revise my comment above: it is NOT possible to submit a new link to Digg at the moment, it seems, regardless of whether the link is blocked or not.
I don't think they censor, but there algorithm and caching is flawed. They should have a feature that after x seconds lets you submit the item anyways.
It is not necessarily Digg that has to do the censoring (think DPI, deep packet inspection). I wonder if they are changing some of the packets, as not only submitting page to Digg does not seem to work right now, but also the "friend"-button in Digg is broken. (Or did it stop working everywhere?)
Is there a proxy anyone knows that goes through a Chinese IP? I want to see this error page that requires a password…
Haven't had any problems with the friend button here. Seems an odd thing to get filtered. Care to elaborate a tad more on how DPI would be affecting both the submission page and the friend button?
I guess China's just protecting their people. But then again, it's a weird way of doing so. I just read a blog post recently about something like this – just the other way around. That parents shouldn't really block off websites (social networking ones) because this is what connects you to the world, to see what's going on etc.
Personally, I think that Digg might just have a bug or something. But if China is preventing people from "seeing" what other people from all over the world are saying.. Maybe they're hiding something. LOL.
This just goes to show you just what an impact social media can really have not just on a business but also an entire country.
Yes, eventually they unbanned Facebook.
My fren from china was able to login to Facebook yesterday….
China is nuts…