There's been a bunch of hubbub on certain blogs about MSN Spaces and some of the content filtering that happens on the site due to a recent Financial Times article entitled Microsoft bans 'democracy' for China web users. I've seen a lot of rhetoric about this topic and have avoided commenting on it since it is a sensitive topic that has evoked rather emotional and inflammatory responses from commenters including some Microsoft employees.
I will say two things though. First of all, the behavior of MSN Spaces isn't something that is tied to any recent ventures in the past month or two by MSN in China as the article purports. In December of last year Boing Boing ran a post entitled Chinese editions of MSN Spaces censor political terms which covers the behavior described in the Financial Times article.
The second is that the response to the initial feedback on the "censorship" on MSN Spaces made by Michael Connolly in his post Comments on Content Moderation is still valid. Specifically he wrote
There have been a lot of observations since we launched on how we moderate content on Spaces. Just so there aren’t any misconceptions floating around, here is exactly what we do, and why. One of our main goals for Spaces was to create a platform for people to share their thoughts and feelings with their friends and the outside world. However, we wanted to make Spaces usable by not only the people who are blogging today, but also be approachable by the general internet user, who might not have heard of blogging previously, or been given an opportunity to try it out. Unfortunately, whenever you create an open platform for people to say whatever they want, and open it up to the wide world (14 languages, in 26 different markets), there is always a handful of people who spoil the party, and post a bunch of inappropriate (and in some cases illegal) stuff. And to make matters worse, what exactly is deemed “appropriate” or not is very subjective, not only from person to person, but from country to country...We block a set of specific words from being used in 3 areas: the url you select, the title of your Space, and the title of your blog entry. These three fields are reused and displayed in a variety of areas, like search results, so we thought it would be a little thing we could do to cut down on the obvious cases that would most easily offend.
There have been a lot of observations since we launched on how we moderate content on Spaces. Just so there aren’t any misconceptions floating around, here is exactly what we do, and why.
One of our main goals for Spaces was to create a platform for people to share their thoughts and feelings with their friends and the outside world. However, we wanted to make Spaces usable by not only the people who are blogging today, but also be approachable by the general internet user, who might not have heard of blogging previously, or been given an opportunity to try it out.
Unfortunately, whenever you create an open platform for people to say whatever they want, and open it up to the wide world (14 languages, in 26 different markets), there is always a handful of people who spoil the party, and post a bunch of inappropriate (and in some cases illegal) stuff. And to make matters worse, what exactly is deemed “appropriate” or not is very subjective, not only from person to person, but from country to country...We block a set of specific words from being used in 3 areas: the url you select, the title of your Space, and the title of your blog entry. These three fields are reused and displayed in a variety of areas, like search results, so we thought it would be a little thing we could do to cut down on the obvious cases that would most easily offend.
MC made his post in December of last year and this is still the state of affairs today. I don't know if any official statement will be made in response to the article but I did think it would add some perspective to the various discussions to actually get the facts and as opposed to hearsay.
Quite frankly I've been saddened see the kind of language and rhetoric used in posts like Tim Bray's Microsoft and China to describe the above situation. We have lots of Chinese users who use MSN Spaces to share their lives with friends, family and the rest of the online world. Read their blogs, view their photos and try to see things from their eyes instead of letting the rhetoric blind you to reality.