Second Life in China: Philip Linden on State Censorship of SL

After a coy but official non-denial denial last week, Virtual World News has confirmed it: the Lindens are indeed working with an Asian company to establish a Second Life presence in China.  Of course, a first thought at that news is how a move like this might expose SL to potential state censorship, or even worse intrusions into the real lives of people in the metaverse-- a point immediately raised by a couple readers. 

As it happens, I also raised this general issue with CEO Philip Linden in person, recently, and now that the news is relevant, should relay what he said then.  In September, I accompanied a French filmmaking couple to interview Philip Linden for their documentary about Second Life.  (For ontological reasons, they liked the idea that the avatar journalist would also be the one interviewing Philip in physical form.)  During our interview, I asked Philip how he believed Second Life would function, when they added connected servers in countries across the world—including nations with wildly different laws and standards regarding sexual content and other contentious forms of expression.

Servers will probably be in all the individual countries where Residents physically lived, he suggested.  Rather than entirely assent to the censorship or regulations each of these countries would demand, Philip had another proposal: each user would be able to select a content restriction filter defined according to country, while the criterion of each nation’s filter would be made publicly available somewhere.  (On the company’s website, or in the SL client itself.)  By making the censorship and regulation process so transparent, he argued, countries would feel market pressures to relax their standards, converging into greater general freedom. 

This was all well and good, but I had to press him on the starker point:  transparency or not, what would happen if an SL server in a repressive state contained real life information of a resident using Second Life’s expression tools to express political dissent?  Would they follow Yahoo’s lead, and simply give the person up to the authorities?  To this, Philip Linden said no, insisting that this would be against the company’s corporate values.

What actually transpires when and if SL servers wind up on Chinese soil, of course, still remains to be seen.  But this, at least, is what Philip Linden told me and my documentarian friends for the record.

Comments

[Troy McLuhan]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Second Life already have a presence in China? Or maybe Anshe Chung Studios is just a figment of our collective imagination?

Content filters are a nice idea in theory, but they don't work very well, even for text (think email spam). Making content filters for 3D objects or animations is even harder. What if a bunch of avatars contort their bodies to spell "Free Tibet" on the front lawn of a Chinese citizen?

It seems to me that the only way for China to be reasonably sure that their citizens are protected from outsiders (and their ideas) is for China to build a walled garden, accessible only to Chinese citizens. Maybe content from outside China could be approved on a case-by-case bases as with There.com.