China banned letter N from internet after people used it to attack Xi Jinping

Try sending a piratebay URL on Facebook Messenger... nope! "Malicious website! Please calm down while we protect you!" (I paraphrase...).

One advantage we have here is that the government is separated enough from the people who have actual executive power to ban content. A sudden ban is quite impossible but we should probably be beware of being a slowly cooked frog.

> they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore

For example, China's constitution also contains "Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."

However various words and phrases to even mention Article 35 itself are banned in some chat apps, etc... in China even though the full text of the constitution is available anyways.

I see Trump fans frequently utter that they like to shut up mainstream media. In their view anybody who is lying or criticizing their great leader doesn't deserve free speech.

The reason constitutions are relatively stable in the west is that people take them seriously and expect violations to be punished. You're more likely to violate the constitution if you think the people won't demand recourse. The constitutional tradition is really the more significant factor. Sadly, ours seems to be weakening.

> Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?

I'm less concerned about politicians in the US and more about grassroots censorship from the political fringes.

> Consider any politician you disagree with deeply and ask yourself: if they could ban dissent from their views, wouldn't they?

Anyone ambitious and competent enough to gain power would. That is the wisdom of the Constitution: balancing checks on power instead of relying on the “right” leader. Based on that, I would amend your question to: would they use the law against others in power who seek to silence dissidents?

It is already happening. In France some website are already censored and send you to a website of the Interior affairs Minister.

Some are also "shadow-banned" (the default DNS of the ISP return nothing), like the pirate bay (but I think it depends on your ISP).

It already happened several times. Twitter admitted to hiding tweets with hash tags like #wikileaks; #podestaemails... So I guess the USA isn't all that different, if you dismiss the propaganda. You just don't have the universal healthcare and you get to spend 10 times more on the military and NSA snooping.

Isn’t the more important question, if you disagree with someone and had the power to censor them, would you do it?

Unless people believe in free speech even when it benefits points of view they disagree with, its future in society is in peril. Nobody wants opinions they like to be censored, it’s much more difficult to say that the NRA or religious fundamentalists should have the same protected right of speech as everyone else.

Absolutely. As a lobbyist I encounter this issue all the time. Unfortunately it's both parties, albeit one more so than the other. Still, issue exists in both parties which is scary.

consider that the internet is the new imperialism of the west. people are so quick to wag the finger at china but no one stops to think that they are looking iut for themselves. Companies like google and facebook promote western values and they do it subversively: whats the old Billy G quote? Integrate, assimilate, dominate, elimate or some such?

this article is just another western propaganda piece trying to paint China as this overbearing big brother entity (which I will admit is a very compelling narrative to western individualists).

This one's so much better: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/07/17/15/426A9E150000057...

It should be called a "headlie" as well, which could be a more fitting word for it anyway depending on which news outlet you visit.

Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that recognizes "N" as part of phrases or sentences that have a high probability of containing other banned words. It is like query expansion in NLP, but in this case it has accidentally banned a word that is widely used in other context.

Edit: This looks like a more reasonable explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061, N is the 14th letter in the alphabet, referring to the 14th item in the proposed changes [1] (the change that removes term limit).

[1] (Chinese) http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm

This feels like satire. China censored a meme sufficiently obscure that people aren't even sure what it was?

The most likely explanation that sprang to mind was that there’s a convention in Chinese for (young) people to say ‘n’ meaning ‘lots’. ie:

A: Have you been to Disney? B: OMG, only like, n times!

(A: 你去过迪斯尼吗？ B: 哎呀我去n次啦)

edit: so i’m confirming Mair’s guess.

I'm pretty sure they're banning the letter N because it was the 14th "proclamation" in the recent posting about constitutional changes by Xinhua news. They tried to bury it under a set of 20~ changes and disguise the wording. First, 14 was banned on weibo. Then, N was banned as people quickly jumped to the 14th letter of the English alphabet.

Weibo also has a history of doing stuff like this, Tiananmen Square is sometimes referred to as May 35th, so they like to play with numbers and their meanings.

That's interesting, because I have an adblocker(ublock origin) and it works fine.

Are you using 'N'etscape 'N'avigator by chance?

Maybe it meant you have a "nad blocker" but it doesn't show the n?

中國