A Quote by Ethan Zuckerman

While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented.

Ethan Zuckerman

Quote Topics

Allowing Censored Censorship China Internet Level Place Speech Take Unprecedented While

Quote Author

Ethan Zuckerman
American - Activist

If you have an internet service provider that's capable of slowing down other sites, or putting other sites out of business, or favoring their own friends and affiliates and customers who can pay for fast lanes, that's a horrible infringement on free speech. It's censorship by media monopolies. It's tragic: here we have a technology, the internet, that's capable really of being the town square of democracy, paved with broadband bricks, and we are letting it be taken over by a few gatekeepers. This is a first amendment issue; it's free speech versus corporate censorship.

Michael Copps

In China, the problem is that with the system of censorship that's now in place, the user doesn't know to what extent, why, and under what authority there's been censorship. There's no way of appealing. There's no due process.

Rebecca MacKinnon

China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.

John Palfrey

Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.

Yiyun Li

I believe that humans adapt to circumstance. The Internet is quite an unprecedented circumstance, so it's going to take people a while to get their heads around it.

Jarvis Cocker

The sanctions have nothing to do with our relations with China, because our relations with the People's Republic of China are at an unprecedented high both in terms of their level and substance. They are what we call "a comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation".

Vladimir Putin

At the State Department, where I oversaw our human rights diplomacy, I often confronted dictatorships like China about their censorship of the Internet, which they justified by claiming they were merely filtering out lies. Our government cannot and should not take that path.

Tom Malinowski

I haven't heard of any cases of anti-American blog posts being censored or bloggers encountering consequences for anti-American speech on the web in China.

Rebecca MacKinnon

I'm not against censorship in principle. Not at all. Some things should be censored.

Paul Morrissey

Experience has shown us that attempts to control the Internet will invariably fail. We should be instructed by the failed efforts of China to regulate political content, the efforts of America to regulate Internet gambling, or the efforts of Australia to regulate certain speech. By its very nature, the Internet will always resist such controls.

Miriam Defensor-Santiago

Self-censorship happens not only in China, or Iran or ex-Soviet places. It can happen anywhere. If an artist penetrates a certain taboo or a certain power through their work, he or she will face this problem. I'm always saying that commercial censorship is our foremost censorship globally today. Why do we still pretend we are free?

Xiaolu Guo

There is a long standing tradition of using code to evade censorship in China, so that goes on. The trouble is the Chinese government has created the world's most sophisticated censorship machine.

John Palfrey

All movies in China are censored. Out of 600 movies produced in China, only 60 are allowed to show in theatres.

Ai Weiwei

My whole life I grew up thinking there is one Internet, but there are actually two, one in the rest of the world and one in China. The one in China is advanced and hi-tech, but it's a scary Internet.

Nuseir Yassin

China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.

Ai Weiwei

The solution to voters potentially being misled by a judicial candidate's political speech is more speech - not government censorship.