Some Chinese bloggers have said that they were able to set up Chinese language MSN Spaces blogs using the “forbidden” political words. To clarify the situation I tried to set up my own freedom loving Chinese blog. I went into the MSN Spaces Chinese interface at: http://spaces.msn.com/?mkt=zh-cn [1], and tried to set up a blog titled 我爱言论自由人权和民主, which means “I love freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy.”
SCREENSHOT DETAIL:
I got the following error message: 您必须输入您的共享空间标题。标题不能包含禁止的语言，例如亵渎的语言。请键入一个不同的标题。Which means: “You must enter a title for your space. The title must not contain prohibited language, such as profanity. Please type a different title.”
SCREENSHOT DETAIL:
I guess Microsoft considers “human rights,” “democracy,” and “freedom of speech” to be profanity.
This censorship can be circumvented with Bennet Haselton's Freedom Hack Instructions. [2] Using the instructions I was successful in creating the Chinese blog called “I love freedom of speech, democracy, and human rights.”
Portnoy in Taiwan has translated the instructions into Chinese [3].
FURTHER UPDATE:
I played around with the freedom & democracy blog I created through the hacking instructions and was able to create posts with politically sensitive headlines like “don't forget June4th 1989″ and “Falungong” without trouble:
So the filtering of MSN Spaces China appears limited to the blog's title only. Titles of individual posts and within the body of posts do not appear to be filtered.