China, Once Again, Using Censorship Elsewhere To Justify Oppressive Great Firewall Of China

Back during both the ACTA fight and the SOPA fight, we pointed out that any move by Western countries to do even minor censorship would be used by the Chinese to justify its own much more oppressive censorship via the Great Firewall of China. The fact that the MPAA held up China as the model of a country that does censorship right played right into the typical Chinese justifications for its internet regime. In fact, Chinese officials have been quoted claiming that they really first put the Great Firewall in place to stop copyright infringement, but have since expanded it to better protect the public.

The latest, as pointed out by Dan Tobias in our comments, is that the official newspaper of the Chinese government is now pointing to various attempts in the west to "block" content to explain that internet censorship is in the public's interest (they refer to it as "web regulation" but you know what they mean). They cite a variety of cases that we've spoken about as heading down the slippery slope to justify their own censorship. They mention Germany's plan to try to tax Google for fair use-level snippets, Facebook's new efforts to censor speech they don't like, the UK's new hysteria blaming Google for child porn, and even the Turkish Prime Minister blaming Twitter for social unrest.