facebook’s not-so-great firewall
I am a twitter user and a facebook user. On facebook, I have it set so that the status message is automatically pulled from my twitter stream. Recently, I’ve noticed that many of my tweets don’t make it onto facebook.
One reason I like the twitter messages going to facebook is that facebook has a superior comments system, and often my friends say interesting things about my status messages; otherwise, I have friends on facebook that are not following me on twitter, and they might like to hear what’s roaming around in my brain every now and then.
Initially, I thought that there was a technical glitch causing the missed tweets. I thought this because I never received any kind of message from facebook indicating anything else was awry. So, today I decided to take a tweet and paste it manually into facebook’s status. This is the tweet:
Ma Zhaoxu says China’s Internet is “open”. I agree completely, as long as by “open”, he means “ajar”. http://u.nu/8hfs4 #GFW
[For anyone not aware of what the tweet refers to: Ma Zhaoxu is a Chinese government spokesperson who was commenting on Google's recent challenge to the Chinese government and its "Great Firewall", which blocks certain content deemed objectionable. In the comment, he claimed that the Chinese Internet is "open", which naturally many of us who deal with the Internet here in China on a daily basis find rather amusing, to say the least, seeing as we cannot access facebook, youtube, twitter, and so on without special software that routes around their blocks. So, my intention was to relay my incredulity at his statement by making a joke...a "play on words", as we say in the USA.]
Anyway, the particular irony here is that in attempting to post this comment about Internet censorship on facebook, here’s what I was greeted with:
(???$#@!!!!!)
(A more cogent explanation of my reaction to seeing that abomination of a message isn’t really possible; all I can conjure up is punctuation.)
I investigated a little and found that the “abusive” content in my status post was the link. The link is to a Xinhua article wherein the Chinese government makes several points (some valid, and some not) about Google’s and the U.S.’s stand against them on the topic of Internet censorship. There was nothing abusive in the article whatsoever; just some opinions that you might or might not agree with.
So, welcome to the USA: where it’s completely reprehensible for the government to censor speech, but it’s perfectly OK for corporations and the public at large to do the same.