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Yahoo blames victims
August 28, 2007
Yahoo seems to be digging itself in deeper with respect to Internet censorship. (See my related post “Law and the Internet.”) The company is facing a lawsuit in federal court in California on behalf of Chinese dissidents Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning, who were jailed when Yahoo disclosed their contact information to Chinese authorities.
In response to the suit, Yahoo is playing hardball. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Yahoo argued Monday that Messrs. Wang and Shi should have realized they were putting themselves in harm's way. ‘They assumed the risk of harm when they chose to use Yahoo China email and group list services to engage in activity they knew violated Chinese law,’ Yahoo said in the filing.”
Maybe blaming the victims is a smart legal strategy for Yahoo, but it strikes me as an exceedingly poor strategy from a public-relations standpoint.
As reported in the Journal, Yahoo said in its filing that "Free speech rights as we understand them in the United States are not the law in China." That’s certainly true, and I can’t fault Yahoo from making that point.
But the Yahoo filing goes on, "Every sovereign nation has a right to regulate speech within its borders."
Now that strikes me as a distinctly un-American statement (albiet one that I fully endorse Yahoo's right to make). It's also beside the point. As reported on a New York Times blog, Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, the group representing the dissidents, said, “It is not the Chinese government that is the defendant here. It is Yahoo, for their part in this process. If not for Yahoo, there would have been no abuses. They gave the pieces of information that allowed China to take these actions.”
Posted by Rick Nelson on August 28, 2007 | Comments (2)
