E-Gatekeeping: A Pilot Study On The Content Censorship Of The Chinese Network Information Interaction Platforms In Mainland China

By the end of the year 2006,China had taken a second place on the dimensions of Internet with 137-million netizen. The confliction between free expression of the netizen and relative censorship in the network information interaction platforms (NIIP) has become a public issue. This article exerts itself on researching the phenomenon of content censorship by filter-software, which was so called the e-gatekeeping, in the Chinese NIIP of mainland China. Through a four-month experiment and a lot of analyses, it has proved that there is e-gatekeeping in any kinds of information interaction modes of Chinese main NIIP in China's mainland, and in general, the proportion is about 62%. Then how e-gatekeeping works, what effect it has, and whether it would do some contributions to the network communication researching and the right of free expression of netizen have been the critical points this article try to explore. Finally, it is found out that e-gatekeeping has many ways to fulfill its mission. But the anticipated result doesn't come out because of its kee-jerk job. At the same time, e-gatekeeping has insulted netizen's right of free expression by its way of simply prohibiting the use of some neutral words to diminish illegal information. Meanwhile, the communication theories would enrich themselves by the novel values of flakey behavior of the e-gatekeeping. However, in a comprehensive and long view, we conclude that e-gatekeeping has still been a right way for censoring NIIP, whose bugs should be corrected by improving its own technology and by cooperation of every net-gatekeeper.