#thegoldenshieldproject

[the-boltman-blog]

Left: The Chinese Youth

Right: The Golden Shield Project/The Great Firewall of China

[kkdigital-blog]

The Golden Shield Project

While we all know that social media has quite literally taken over the majority of our lives, and has become an extremely popular tool for communication as well as a source of entertainment in households worldwide.

 Although, what you may not know is that the largest population of Internet users in the world is China. Though, China has one of the most restricted Internets around the globe. The great firewall is said to be the most technically sophisticated Internet filtering/censorship system in the world. (Riggall, 2013)

 8 different Internet service providers that are all controlled by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology provide China’s Internet access. There are various multifaceted systems in place that censor the population of China such as IP blocking, DNS hijacking and keyword content filtering. (Riggall, 2013)

 Think about sitting down to your laptop or iPad after a long day at work, and attempting to log into Facebook. A censor message appears on the screen, and you are denied access to our favourite social media site. How would you feel? What would you think? Well, for the Chinese population this is a regular occurrence.

Though while they do not have access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, they are provided with alternatives that include Baidu (search engine like Google), Sina Weibo (blogging site like Twitter), Renren (their equivelant of Facebook) and Youku Tudou (Video site similar to YouTube).

Chiu, Lin and Silverman (2013, Pg 1) claim that “social media is exploding worldwide and China is leading the way”. While it is obvious that social media has indeed blown up so to speak, on a global level, I do not agree that China has been leading the way. Most countries including us here in Australia do have some censorship in place, but it is nowhere near what China is undertaking. This pretty much goes against our beliefs and values as Australian citizens, including freedom, free speech, and our rights as human beings to do as we please, provided it is still legal of course. 

I really hope that China doesn’t continue to attempt to change the way the world is able to utilise their Internet usage, because I certainly don’t want to log into Facebook one day to find that it has been blocked. Do you?

 References: 

- Riggall, M. (2013). Virtual Reality!: Behind the great firewall of China. [Online] Virtualreality91.blogspot.com.au. Available at: http://virtualreality91.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/behind-great-firewall-of-china.html

- Wikipedia, (2015). Golden Shield Project. [Online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project