media - SMS filtering with Chinese characteristics

(next week at tidbits)

Sight. Now even the New York Times dived into the recent hype about China’s supposed filtering of SMS messages on the 300 million mobile phones in the country it is time to look back on what actually happened. The Russian newswire Interfax reported first that a small unknown company called Venus Information Technology obtained a license for an SMS filtering system. But then the NGO’s chipped in and the press release triggered off a press coverage that suggested the country could be on the brink of a conservative revolution.
Similar systems to filter the internet have been – by and large – a failure in China, because the negative economic fallout of the filtering system, bringing internet traffic down to almost nothing, proved to be two years ago so massive the filters basically had to be switched off. The frequent use of homonyms in Chinese for sensitive words made it also rather useless as an instrument for political control, compared to other methods.
But those subtleties tend to go lost in an optimistic, engineer driven technology like telecommunication. And the media see a picture that matches their classic clichés about China and so they report about a massive policy change based on a press release and add only dispatches of China’s propaganda machines that would otherwise be discarded as biased nonsense.

I just sent off some really nasty SMS-messages. Now see what happens.