Blocking Blogs in China

The popularity of blogs in China has skyrocketed in recent months. The country currently has 300,000 bloggers and that number grows daily. But popularity has a price. A new study by the OpenNet Initiative -- a research partnership of the Citizen Lab (University of Toronto), the Berkman Center, and the Advanced Network Research Group (University of Cambridge) -- indicates that government censorship of blogs is now common and focuses on lists of banned keywords. While the filtering is "relatively coarse," the report documents the way sensitive political words, including the names of political leaders and references to Tiananmen Square and the Falun Gong movement, are blocked or substituted with characters like "*." Read the full report.