Saying Hong Kong is an independent country is only offending the ccp, im pretty sure the citizens dont care.

apple502j wrote:

Hong Kong is not a country, but in my opinion it is very different from the mainland China that I think it is fine to put it as a separate category. Also, Antarctica is in that option despite not being a country, too.

We should respect all countries if we can, but we should respect human rights and freedom of speech first. There are some countries which restricts women rights, but that does not mean we have to ban women in this website - and same thing goes for Hong Kong.

but they shouldn't call it “select your country”

I don't think it's a big problem, just a mistake during the re-designing. After all, Scratch is a programming website, and not a website made specifically for anti-CCP people.

Good bye, Scratch---Cat

gavinye2018 wrote:

but they shouldn't call it “select your country”

For some reason the Scratch Team doesn't want to change that.

miagupta wrote:

What can we do

I don't know. The Scratch Team can change “country” to “location” or “region”, that's all I can think of.

Seems like it's not that simple. They also need to remove any content against China.

miagupta wrote:

What can we do

We can put #UnbanScratch in our signatures and profiles.

garnet-chan wrote:

miagupta wrote:

What can we do

We can put #UnbanScratch in our signatures and profiles.

I don't think that would change anything, except that the people who do this might feel a little bit better.

Dang, this sucks. I knew that this would probably happen at some point, especially because the website has lots of freedom of expression, with users being able to post anything they want that follows the community guidelines, even though some of that stuff violates China's laws. The only way I see Scratch coming back in china is if there's a version specifically made without any social media-like capabilities, or if there was any social media aspect of it, it would have to be heavily moderated and would be very restrictive to follow China's laws, which is something the Scratch Team probably doesn't have the capability to do right now. I hope some form of Scratch returns, even if it's just a website with only the editor.

miagupta wrote:

What can we do

First, the ST has to figure out why China banned the site, and then make whatever changes that China would want. If this includes censoring anti-CCP viewpoints or anything from the West, they'd have to do that too (the ST, in that case, would probably just deal with losing their Chinese users).

It might not sound fair, but that's because authoritarian regimes with massive amounts of leverage don't play fair.

Flowermanvista wrote:

miagupta wrote:

What can we do

First, the ST has to figure out why China banned the site, and then make whatever changes that China would want. If this includes censoring anti-CCP viewpoints or anything from the West, they'd have to do that too (the ST, in that case, would probably just deal with losing their Chinese users).

It might not sound fair, but that's because authoritarian regimes with massive amounts of leverage don't play fair.

Well, it's because there's content that's about Free Hong Kong and No Chinese content on Scratch. I'm an active user in the Chinese sub-forum, so I know about this. I even saw the video that triggered all this mess.

Byron_Inc wrote:

Flowermanvista wrote:

miagupta wrote:

What can we do

First, the ST has to figure out why China banned the site, and then make whatever changes that China would want. If this includes censoring anti-CCP viewpoints or anything from the West, they'd have to do that too (the ST, in that case, would probably just deal with losing their Chinese users).

It might not sound fair, but that's because authoritarian regimes with massive amounts of leverage don't play fair.

Well, it's because there's content that's about Free Hong Kong and No Chinese content on Scratch. I'm an active user in the Chinese sub-forum, so I know about this. I even saw the video that triggered all this mess.

Just a question, what did the video contain (unless it mostly contains content not allowed on Scratch)?

I think that is up to the ST.

It contained screenshots of anti-China projects

I'm curious: what about Scratch is disrespectful about China? Please keep in mind many of us do not come from there so it's somewhat hard to get the full context of your point of view.

RIP…

DownsGameClub wrote:

I'm curious: what about Scratch is disrespectful about China? Please keep in mind many of us do not come from there so it's somewhat hard to get the full context of your point of view.

Probably Hong Kong and Taiwan being listed as countries during registration.

Maximouse wrote:

DownsGameClub wrote:

I'm curious: what about Scratch is disrespectful about China? Please keep in mind many of us do not come from there so it's somewhat hard to get the full context of your point of view.

Probably Hong Kong and Taiwan being listed as countries during registration.

But that's been on the site for years. Why would they now block the site?

In case the Scratch Team can't do anything about this, they could switch to the old Google-based search again, I think it gave better results.