It all started with the Internet coming to China in January 1996. China then began internet censorship in August 1996 by blocking numerous websites. Eventually, Google was blocked in 2002 and replaced by the Chinese search engine Baidu. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were all later banned. In 2013, the Chinese government officially banned over 40 video games due to many of the games “culturally invading” China and “threatening their national security (zdnet.com). Recently, the New York Times was blocked off the Chinese App Store. As technology advances in countries such as China so does the government’s desire to censor the clear majority of people.
This constant, yet stealth censorship is not only happening in China. In a recent study done by Freedom House, two-thirds of the world’s internet users live under government censorship. Additionally, internet freedom has declined for the sixth consecutive year (Freedomhouse.org). It has been proved that the Chinese government ranks last in
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Societies such as these started by cracking down on digital freedom. They continued by censoring everything a person can do and control the population’s thoughts by “censoring history” by removing historical facts. In China, the user-generated encyclopedia, developed by Baidu, has entries for years 1988 and 1990 but not 1989, the year that the Tiananmen Square riots happened (FreedomHouse.org). These pieces of evidence suggest that to retain the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the party leaders have taken such measures, such as deleting years in history, to keep the average citizen from viewing western ideals. The definition of communism, defined by Meriam-Webster dictionary, is “a system in which goods are owned in common and are available as needed” (Merriam-Webster). Is this party not contradicting their own core beliefs by censoring their own people and not offering the internet as