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MySpace's move into China concerns rights campaigners

MySpace, the world's most popular online social network, has launched a version of its Web site in China, despite fears among human-rights campaigners that users will be censored or spied on by the totalitarian Communist state.

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp, which owns MySpace, said last year that the company was looking for a way to enter China without running into political obstacles of the type faced by Google, which agreed to self-censor its content; and by Yahoo, which has repeatedly provided the Chinese government with information allowing them to identify anonymous Web users.

Both companies have been targeted by Irrepressible.info, the joint campaign run by the Observer newspaper and Amnesty International calling for freedom of speech online.

Murdoch has set up a separate business to avoid any problems. MySpace China is a "locally owned, operated and managed company" in which News Corp is only one among several investors, according to its chief executive, Luo Chuan, the former head of Microsoft's MSN China.

"Our team here will have the sole right to decide the operation model, the technology platform as well as the product strategy. It's very unlike the other multinationals you might have heard about or seen in the Chinese market," he said.

Campaigners fear that the site, which allows users to share text, pictures, music and videos, will provide another means for China's army of Internet police to gather information on users.

Dozens of Chinese bloggers have been jailed for posting political comments or spreading information concerning corruption and human-rights violations.

Even with MySpace China still in its "beta" testing stage, allegations of censorship have emerged. According to the technology news site Texyt.com, discussion forums on religion and politics are nowhere to be found on MySpace.cn, despite being popular topics on the main MySpace sites. Instead, users are only offered safer topics such as sport and films.

Texyt also reports that users are told to click a button if they spot any "misconduct" by other users -- actions such as "endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order."

Attempts to post content containing a variety of sensitive terms, such as "Taiwanese independence," "Falun Gong" or "Dalai Lama," produce the following message: "Sorry, the article you want to publish may contain inappropriate content. Please delete the unsuitable content, and then try reposting it. Thank you."

Ron Deibert of the OpenNet Initiative, an alliance opposed to the filtering of the Internet, said: "We should look at it along the same lines as other technology investors in the country that had to alter their conduct to comply with Chinese restrictions."

MySpace issued a statement which said: "As a locally owned, operated and managed company, MySpace China complies with local law and legal enforcement requests."
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