Chinese censorship applied to bloggers
Today the Chinese state media announced that its government is not satisfied with the growing popularity of blogging in China and wants to force users to register with their genuine name.
This way bloggers can be penalized when they don’t conform to the strict censorship laws.
The Chinese government currently blocks hundreds of websites that contain political sensitive material. Also now search engines do not provide all the available content. From the 58 people that are imprisoned in the world (data from September 2006) with regards to cyber crime, human rights organisation Reporters sans Frontières claims fifty are locked up in China.
The state media says that at the end of 2006 China had 20.8 million bloggers. In total there are 132 million internet users in China, thus 16% have a blog.
Source: Audio announcement
