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ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

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This quarterly publication is a quarterly journal that publishes refereed articles addressing issues of computing as it impacts the lives of people with disabilities. The journal will be of particular interest to SIGACCESS members and delegrates to its affiliated conference (i.e., ASSETS), as well as other international accessibility conferences.

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in the group, causing its number of followers to grow rapidly by 200 in just one day. Whether those followers were neo-Nazi sympathizers or simply people who were interested in the case is unclear, but what is clear is that the censorship itself acted as global publicity. It is arguable that in both cases the furor caused by the censorship of information has only served to draw attention to it further, surely defeating its purpose.

In fact, ever since the samizdatb of the Soviet bloc, it has been clear that in many ways overt censorship has always served to stimulate interest in the forbidden material. In the case of samizdat, this forbidden material became strongly fetishized in such a way as to make its contents immediately appealing, and immediately accepted by many sections of the population as truth. As Ann Komaromi has said in her essay “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” “[Samizdat was]… something on which to get high… … an intoxicating product. It was forbidden fruit.” 4 The process of overt censorship here only served to elevate the censored material to a sacred status. It is clear that it also serves to expose a government’s intentions, and in many cases to undermine the government’s credibility.

Why is it, then, that governments such as China’s still choose to pursue a policy of aggressive and overt Internet censorship? The issue was investigated by researchers at Harvard University. 3 The conclusion they came to was that China’s policy on censorship is not what it seems. From the outside, it may seem China’s intention is to suppress all anti-government discussion and the expression of revolutionary ideas. In fact, what China found was that direct criticism of the government was no more likely to be censored than anything else. Censorship was instead targeted at postings that sought specifically to organize collective anti-government action or to create action groups of any kind.

Germany’s reasoning for the censorship of Better Hannover was similar. Germany’s aim was not the sup-

censorship exposes
a government’s
intentions and
in many cases
undermines
the government’s
credibility.

pression of neo-Nazi ideas, but rather the prevention of any organized and collective anti-democratic action suggested by those ideas.

It is easy to see why Germany would adopt such a policy. After the horrors that National Socialism inflicted on the German population, it was clear that measures had to be taken to stop such a situation from arising in the future. Unfortunately, however, these measures may only serve to stimulate interest in the subject, and to create a whole new kind of samizdat in the form of websites that must be accessed covertly. They may be successful in disabling action by these forces for a certain period of time, but it remains to be seen in both cases whether the publicity created by overt and aggressive censorship ultimately strengthens or weakens the government’s position.

 

References

1. bradsher, k. china criticizes the times for article on premier’s family fortune. The New York Times (oct. 26, 2012); http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/ world/asia/china-criticizes-the-times-for-article-on-premiers-family-fortune.html?ref=censorship.

2. brumfield, b. and Smith-Spark, l. twitter blocks content of german neo-nazi group. cnn (oct. 10, 2012); http://articles.cnn.com/2012-10-18/tech/ tech_twitter-censorship_ 1_alex-macgillivray-twitter- neo-nazi.

3. king, g., Pan, J., and roberts, m. how censorship in china allows government criticism but silences collective expression; http://gking.harvard.edu/gking/ files/censored.pdf.

4. komaromi, a. the material existence of Soviet Samizdat. Slavic Review 63, 3 (autumn 2004), 605.

 

Jean-Loup Richet ( [e-mail]) is an information systems service manager at orange in Paris, france, and Ph.D. student at nantes university (lemna), nantes, france.

 

b ‘Self-editing and publishing’ in times of censorship.Fo r more details, see http://bit. ly/183hLUU.