Re:Illegal prime
by logfromblammo on Friday April 27, 2018 @11:25AM
(#16941458)
That's why the Tiananmen Square Maassacre anniversary date is commonly referred to as "May 35th".
Banning specific representations of an idea is a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as you ban one symbolic representation, a new one will be created.
The Chinese government isn't stupid. They do what they do because it works. Even the opposition agrees with this, hence the term
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
The website dedicated to the topic of the OP article is even called... http://chillingeffects.org/ (since renamed to https://lumendatabase.org/ )
You can literally arbitrarily associate any number to anything and ban it based on that, which they did:
> In 2012, it was reported that the numbers 89, 6, and 4 each became banned search terms on search engines in China, because of the date (1989-06-04) of the June Fourth Massacre in Tiananmen Square.
> Due to the association with gangs, in 2012 a school district in Colorado banned the wearing of jerseys that bore the numbers 18, 14, or 13 (or the reverse, 81, 41, or 31).
> In 2017, far-right Slovak politician Marian Kotleba was criminally charged for donating 1,488 euro to a charity.
It's closely related to hate speech laws where the only requirement is perceived threat. Fun times. :D