As diplomatically as they were phrased, President Obama's comments today to a town hall meeting of Chinese students in Shanghai about the value of a free and open Internet probably made his hosts glad they had refused to give him the national television exposure his predecessors had enjoyed. Instead, only a local TV audience saw the Q&A session, in which Obama touched on the touchy subject of censorship and government restrictions, while a transcript, rather than a promised "live broadcast," appeared on the Web site of the state-run Xinhua news agency.
In response to a question about whether he was familiar with China's "Great Firewall," Obama said , "I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet, or unrestricted Internet access, is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged."
Obama was also asked "Should we be able to use Twitter freely?" and began with the revelation (perhaps startling to the more innocent of the 2.6 million followers of his Twitter account) that "I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone." He continued: "I should be honest, as president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time. [But] because in the United States, information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear." Probably not the sort of opinion the Chinese government wants to hear.
Meanwhile in Egypt, United Nations officials at the Internet Governance Forum took the kid-gloves treatment of China's state censorship to absurd lengths Sunday. At a reception sponsored by the OpenNet Initiative , U.N. security officials came in and took down a poster for ONI's upcoming book, "Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace." The officials said they were responding to the complaints of unnamed delegates over the following sentence on the poster: "The first generation of controls, typified by China's 'Great Firewall', are being replaced by more sophisticated techniques that go beyond mere denial of information." Said Al Alegre of the Foundation for Media Alternatives, a member of the ONI Network, "We condemn this undemocratic act of censoring our event just because someone is trying to impress or be in the good graces of the Chinese government. It is ironic that while people are allowed to gather here to discuss freedom of expression online, censorship and surveillance practices on the Internet, we are being restricted in expressing our views."
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