July 7, 2004
SMS Filtering in China: The Real Story
From E-Media Tidbits.
"Sigh. Now that even the NY Times has dived into the recent hype about China's supposed filtering of SMS messages on the 300 million mobile phones in the country, it is time to look back on what actually happened.
The Russian newswire Interfax reported first that a small, unknown company called Venus Information Technology obtained a license for an SMS filtering system. But then other organizations chipped in and the press release triggered worldwide media coverage that suggested the country could be on the brink of a conservative revolution.
Similar systems to filter the Internet have been, by and large, a failure in China, because the negative economic fallout of the filtering system -- bringing Internet traffic down to almost nothing -- proved two years ago to be so massive that the filters basically had to be switched off. The frequent use of homonyms in Chinese for sensitive words also made it rather useless as an instrument for political control, compared to other methods.
But those subtleties tend to get lost in an optimistic, engineer-driven technology like telecommunications. And the media see a picture that matches their classic cliches about China, and so they report about a massive policy change based on a press release and add only dispatches of China's propaganda machines that would otherwise be discarded as biased nonsense. ... I just sent off some really nasty SMS messages from here in Shanghai. Now we'll see what happens."
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