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Go ahead and censor me, Mok tells LinkedIn

All Around Town's social media accounts - as you might expect - were overflowing last night with commemorative messages for the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

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Gunman Li Tak-yan shook up his estate over the weekend.

All Around Town's social media accounts - as you might expect - were overflowing last night with commemorative messages for the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown. But one in particular caught our attention. IT lawmaker Charles Mok posted an old picture on professional networking site LinkedIn of what is believed to be a scene from the aftermath of the crackdown on the streets of Beijing. He added a caption: "Go ahead, censor it, LinkedIn!" The pan-democrat's challenge was prompted by the site's removal of June 4-related content yesterday. An official notification from LinkedIn to the owner of a censored message read: "LinkedIn determined that recent public activity you posted … contained content prohibited in China. As a result, this content will not be seen by LinkedIn members." As members of the media benefit from freedom of speech, perhaps we might consider removing our LinkedIn accounts as well.

 

The art of expression is a profound matter, and a Beijing loyalist has provided us with some good learning material on how to express oneself subtly. On the sensitive anniversary when the Communist Party is blamed for the Tiananmen Square bloodshed in 1989, National People's Congress deputy David Wong Yau-kar posted a New York Times article dated June 4, 25 years ago. The article, "Crackdown in Beijing", was posted with a perfectly neutral caption: "Reported by Nicholas Kristof of the NYT 25 years ago". The Beijing loyalist added no comment to the content he posted, but unless he was rejecting what was reported by the US paper, it seemed to confirm one thing that many pro-Beijing figures have been trying to deny: "Troops attack and … scores are killed."

 

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