I’d like to say the Chinese Internet Filtering system is one of the most sophisticated in the world. why? In this article, I will show what kind of content is blocked by Chinese ISPs.
The Golden Shield Project, namely, the firewall of china, is owned by the government of china and started in 1998. It was supposed to monitor, filter, and block sensitive online content. This internet filtering system is decentralized and flexible. It don’t target the whole domain extensions (i.e. .com or .us) or specific types of websites (i.e. pornographic websites), but rather keywords. These keywords relate to some materials such as groups the Chinese government has banned, political ideologies they consider unacceptable and historical events the Chinese government do not wish to have discussed.Politically sensitive content is the main target of the censorship in China. Hot topics include “Tibet”, “Taiwan” and “falun gong”. Websites offering political information are blocked such as BBC and a voice of American. When users attempted to view one of them, they are punished with an involuntary time-out lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Search engines are similarly restricted. If you enter the characters for "democracy" or "08chapter" into Google.cn you will generally get zero results.
Similar methods are applied to blogs . If internet user write or discuss sensitive issue, it will be defined as “harmful information” and be erased soon, and in the most egregious cases blogs are shut down altogether.
Chat tools are censored too.For example, Tom-Skype, a kind of chat tools, operates a text filter. The filter has a list of words which will not be displayed in Skype chats. The text filter operates on the chat message content before it is encrypted for transmission if the message is found unsuitable for delivery, it is discarded and not delivered anywhere.
