Yahoo! Provokes Amnesty International

Posted on March 3, 2006 in Atrocity Censorship

A few years ago, I ran into a former college dorm-mate* in a drug store line. Tianneman Square had just come to its bloody close and this fellow handed me his card identifying him as an exporter of Chinese goods. Everyone was beginning to see China as the new frontier, a vast market to be tapped for manufactured goods and consumers. I asked him about Tianneman Square, about the unarmed students facing the tanks. He told me “Well, both sides did stuff….”

Pure business-shit.

Yahoo!, once the flagship of the Free Internet, plays only one side of the story in China according to Amnesty International:

The details are shocking. Investigations by Amnesty International and others show that:

• At the Chinese government’s request Yahoo! routinely censors search engine results in China — without disclosing that the censorship has happened.
• Yahoo!-disclosed private user information has been used to persecute at least three political dissidents in China.
• In one case, that of journalist Shi Tao, information turned over by Yahoo! was the main evidence in a trial that ended in a 10-year prison sentence. The main piece of evidence was a private email Mr. Shi sent to the United States from his Yahoo email account.

We don’t really know how many voices have been silenced through Yahoo!’s collusion, or how many people have been rounded up. What we do know, and why we need your help, is that Yahoo! cannot hide behind the supposed realpolitik of working in China.

Recent examinations of four American Internet companies operating in China — Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco — suggest that Yahoo has actively aided repressive forces in China. Only Yahoo! has helped jail political dissidents.

New York Times columnist and consistent voice for human rights Nicholas Kristof concludes “Yahoo! sold its soul and is a national disgrace.”

Tell Yang and Filo to knock it off.

*The college we’d attended together (I left after a year and a half) had been endorsed by the John Birch Society.