Outspoken Kai-fu Lee details Chinese censorship
The well-known Chinese executive and censorship critic posts a list of how often his comments on social networks are deleted. It's a lot.
Widely followed Chinese commentator Kai-fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft executive, took to Twitter today to lay out just how often his blog posts get censored.
Turns out, it's quite often.
Lee, who ran Google's China division and founded Microsoft's China research lab before that, is now an investor in China. He speaks out regularly about censorship in China and recently encouraged his 30 million followers on the Chinese social-networking site Weibo to follow him on Twitter.
Today, Lee tweeted to those followers that his posts have been deleted dozens of times during the last year. Some 20 posts were censored in just the last few weeks when Lee was commenting on the news of thousands of rotting pig carcases floating in the rivers of Shanghai. He's also spoken out about the new Chinese government leaders.
The Chinese government has been particularly sensitive to discussions on the Weibo and Tencent social-networking sites about politics and the environment. Last month, Lee was banned for three days after using Weibo to complain about state controls over the Internet, something he referred to in his Tweet today as his "3-day silence."