Update on China's 'Great Firewall'

Berkman affiliate Benjamen Walker writes here about his panel presentation at last week's SXSW conference. Walker, a radio producer, was recently in China working on a radio piece on the Berkman Center's OpenNet Initiative project. While there, he noted "five misconceptions about the great firewall of China," which he spoke about at the conference. Walker writes that Internet censorship is, indeed, very present in China. However, it's important to realize that "the majority of this censorship takes place at the user level. Of course this is due to the fact that there are very real nasty consequences if the officials get involved - but still, if we are interested in studying how this system works, then the very real self-censoring must be taken into account."