Is Microsoft helping the Chinese communists suppress speech that they don’t like? It sure sounds that way.

Reporter Rebecca MacKinnon tells the story of Zhao Jing who blogs under the handle “Michael Anti.” MacKinnon notes that “Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptible.” His blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces website, was recently shut down, apparently by Microsoft. So MacKinnon conducted her own tests, and discovered that MSN Spaces is systematically censoring words and removing blogs thought to be threatening to the Chinese regime:

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like “Tibet Independence” or “Falun Gong” (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: “This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item.”

However I was successful in posting blog entries with non-controversial titles, but with politically sensitive words in the text body. For instance, a blog post titled “I love you” had “Tibet independence” in the text body, and a post titled “I am happy” had “Falun Gong” in the body [...]

This was on Friday December 16th. By Monday the 19th, the whole blog had been taken down [...] with an error message: “This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

Now, 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. 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.