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IFJ Launches Interactive Site for Tracking China’s Press Freedom Violations

Have you ever wanted to be able to visualize where and when Chinese authorities violate the freedom of the press? No? Well, too bad, because the International Federation of Journalists has created a site that will allow you to do that anyway. The site, which you can access here, displays reported incidents of press freedom violations over a map of China. On the right side, a drop-down menu allows users to select any year from 2008 to 2012, and on the map itself users can click on the red dots indicating violations to read more about what happened and view a map of where it happened. Unfortunately, that’s about all there is. None of the incidents listed have any links to relevant media reports, so if you want more detail, you’re going to have to Google it. And there are also some bugs in the placement of locations. For example Kunming, which is the capital of Yunnan Province, appears somewhere along the Western border between Tibet and Xinjiang for reasons I cannot explain. The project was apparently funded the National Endowment for Democracy, a private non-profit that is a lightning rod for criticism from supporters of China’s regime because it is funded by the US Congress and has provided funding to Chinese dissidents like the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo. For that reason, the Chinese government is likely to dismiss the site as an American smear campaign, but readers can assess the validity of any of the site’s specific claims themselves easily enough with Google and a little time if they’re so inclined. Still, it’s very odd that the IFJ site doesn’t include source links for any of its incident reports. Even if the site isn’t everything you might hope for, though, it’s nice to see journalist organizations and NGOs embracing interactive graphics like this. I hope that in the future, we’ll see more data visualization like this.