In China the censorship of the internet is pretty common, to the point where social networks such as Facebook, and Google’s services have been banned or given limited access to. In fact we have heard stories of how bloggers in China have been sent to jail for speaking up against their government, even though some of it was written in a humorous manner. Now we are hearing that according to Xiao Qiang, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information, he has managed to acquire over 2,600 Communist Party directives where he found that in a bid to help spread more pro-government propaganda, prisoners who were willing to tweet pro-government messages via Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) would actually be given reduced sentences!
Apart from this rather shocking find, the directives also found that not only are the Communist Party paying netizens to wrote pro-government messages, but it seems that the work has also been contracted out to commercial enterprises as well! That’s probably as “big brother” as it gets, we think!
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