Microsoft employee Robert Scoble publicly excoriated his own company for allegedly taking down the MSN Spaces blog of a controversial Chinese journalist. In a post published Tuesday morning on his
blog, Scobleizer, he criticized the MSN Spaces team for "being used as a state-run thug."
"It's one thing to pull a list of words out of blogs using an algorithm. It's another thing to
become an agent of a government and censor an entire blogger's work," Scoble wrote on his blog. "Yes, I know the consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars. But, the
behavior of my company in this instance is not right."
Scoble based his post on one by former CNN reporter Rebecca MacKinnon, who runs the blog RConversation, which noted that the Chinese
blogger, Zhao Jing, who goes by the pseudonym Michael Anti, has had his site taken down--apparently by MSN Spaces itself. "It is very important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved or removed
at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible from the United States as well as from China," MacKinnon wrote. "This means that the action was taken not by Chinese authorities responsible
for filtering and censoring the Internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers."
MSN declined to comment at press time, but a poster claiming to be a member of the
MSN Spaces team, Dare Obasanjo, engaged Scoble in the comments section of his blog. "Given that you work at Microsoft and know folks on the Spaces team, isn't the intelligent thing to do to get the
facts straight first before fanning the flames of speculation and making inflammatory comments," he wrote.
Scoble responded that he was willing to accept the possibility that MSN Spaces was
innocent of wrongdoing, and asked him for more information.
Scoble has previously stirred up controversy regarding MSN's policies in China. In June, he at first defended MSN Spaces' word
filter--which removed certain words from blog post headlines that the Chinese government wished to censor, including "democracy" and religious sect "Falun Gong." A week after the post defending the
program, in the face of criticism from fellow bloggers, he retracted, writing: "In the face of overwhelming evidence, I admit I'm wrong. Trying to justify the Chinese MSN word blocker is one of the
more boneheaded things I've done. Sorry."
MSN isn't the only Internet company to struggle with censorship in China; Google and Yahoo! both agreed to censor their search engines.