There's a comedy RSS feed that I subscribe to that links to The Onion parody news website. Today I saw a link to an article titled "Chinese TV Show Canceled After Drawing Only 180 Million Viewers." I tried to click on the link, but I got a bizarre message saying "You are not authorized to access this page."
The supposed name of the canceled show is "Hijinx of the Masses." I took this small and unusual snippet of text from the RSS feed and did a Google search and found the original link. But I clicked on it and once again got the same message: "You are not authorized to access this page."
I was finally able to read the text of the original article by clicking on the Google cache link underneath the original link on the search results. I'm surprised that this would be censored. The last line in the article contains a mildly offensive jab at the government, but I can't imagine that this would be worth censoring. Do you think that this is the doing of the Singapore government? Could it be M1, my internet provider? I wonder if it is possible that The Onion is doing a little self censorship and blocking the article so that they can continue to sell their books without offending the Asian masses.
Here's the link to the original Onion article.
(This is where I got the error message.)
Link
Here's the link to the Google cache version.
Link
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
IS THE ONION PARTIALLY CENSORED IN SINGAPORE?
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3 comments:
The same error occurs in the UK, and an article that seems to replace the original "Man use big word", is written with a similar sort of incorrect grammar that I've often seen in emails from Chinese speaking trolls (reminiscent of "All your base are belong to us"). Perhaps they've been inundated with poorly worded complaints from Chinese patriots, and this is their response in the form of an in joke? Just a thought.
I can't access the article from within the U.S., either. I had to read it in Google's cache.
If you read Spanish, you might be interested in reading this:
http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20080507/53460878719.html
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