Censorship by the self-removal of key words from internet discussion is being forced upon users of a new Microsoft blogging service in China.  The blog tool developed for MSN Spaces, launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, aims at preventing government-sensitive issues from being raised online.

So type a “subversive” word or term on your keyboard and up pops an instruction to delete it.  Offenders include:-

freedom, democracy, human rights, communism, socialism, capitalism, Taiwanese independence, Tibet, Dalai Lama, Falun Gong, terrorism, massacre, Tiananmen, demonstration

The names of senior Chinese politicians will also trigger the deletion order.

As for Microsoft’s business ethics, who cares when there’s a market that big there for the taking?  Anyway, being harmless, happy-dippy people having happy-dippy days on the net is what we all love about this blogging thing, right?

A Microsoft spokesman said the restrictions were the price the company had to pay to spread the positive benefits of blogs and online messaging.

“Even with the filters, we’re helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here,” Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director at MSN, told the Associated Press news agency.

According to the free-speech group, Reporters Without Borders, Microsoft is not alone in accepting censorship demands from China.  It says Yahoo was there first.  And it’s concerned about the direction Google may be taking, too:-

Google, which has so far refused to censor its search engine, now looks likely to follow in the footsteps of its competitor. When the company announced it was opening an office in China, Reporters Without Borders wrote to its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them to respond clearly to the question: “Would you agree to censorship of your search engine if Beijing asked you to”.  Google never replied.

The arrival of self-censorship follows upon the decision by Chinese authorities to close down all China-based websites and blogs that are not officially registered.

Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist Party’s propaganda. This decision will enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively.

And this they can do without ever having heard the words, hate speech.