At BlogOn, I met Kevin Wen, a social software proponent who runs a blog hosting service in China. As you know from following Xiao Qiang’s posts, its hard to fathom the challenges of running a business that encourages free expression under an oppressive regime.

When a user posts a to their blog, its scanned for keywords and automatically censored on a per-post level. The year 1989 and the place Tiananmen do not exist in the Chinese blogosphere. The keyword list was gained from another industry participant, a shared practice to avoid having the entire service being shut down by government censors. Without this commercial self-censorship, the service wouldn’t exist. As Clay said, Social software is political science in executable form. Different constitutions encode different bargains.

Presumably users route around this by modifying their own language an act of individual self-censorship. Optimizing for expression within boundaries. This is a common practice in totalitarian regimes. Before my former employer became the President of Estonia, he was an anthropologist, writer and filmmaker. When politics are oppressed, leaders lead through culture and signal in code.

The practice of self-censorship isn’t too distinguished from what many bloggers do every day. We optimize our language for attention and in some cases, profit. Whether it be picking clever titles for posts for search engine optimization, or more explicitly choosing language to drive Google AdSense revenue.