A Quote by John Palfrey

China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.

John Palfrey

Quote Topics

Censorship China Internet Most Regime

Quote Author

John Palfrey
American - Educator
Born: 1972

By contrast, China is a repressive regime that denies its citizens the essential freedoms of religion, political dissent and representative self-government.

Todd Akin

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

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

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

Ethan Zuckerman

I did not suggest that Iran is a democracy; just the opposite. I talked about it being a repressive theocracy. What I think is indisputable is that even within this repressive regime, the political leaders there - including the Supreme Leader - are sensitive to the concerns of the population within bounds.

Barack Obama

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

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

It's one thing to say you're feminist, but then what does that mean? Not selling arms to a regime that is the most repressive and probably one of the worst human rights violators, particularly towards women, like Saudi Arabia?

Jagmeet Singh

The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information, or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century, as North Korea has done.

Peter Singer

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

What is the value of having millions of people in Iraq not having a repressive regime? What is the value of having the Iraqi regime not shooting at UK and US aircraft almost every day? What is the value of the Iraqis having a free press? What is the value of the foreign minister of Iraq going to Paris, calling for an end of the Gadhafi regime and citing Iraq as a model, as an example, that in fact a freer political system can exist in that part of the world?

Donald Rumsfeld

Our studies have shown that China's online censorship systems are by far the most sophisticated and extensive in the world.

John Palfrey

The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach -- condemnation without discussion -- can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.

Barack Obama

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.