Twitter has just been added to the list of sites blocked by what is colloquially known as the Great Firewall of China. And actually it’s just one of a whole bunch of major sites that were blocked (or in some cases re-blocked) as of today, including: Flickr, Bing, Live.com and Hotmail. Of course, this is nothing new for a country that has previously cut off access to everything from CNN.com to Wikipedia at various points.

What is a bit of a new wrinkle is the seeming focus on shutting down their resident’s ability to access social networking sites. And no, it’s not really to keep their citizens from keeping abreast of the latest from the mind of Ashton Kutcher. Reports seem to indicate that Chinese authorities are looking to quiet down social networks and media ahead of the upcoming 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4th. Of course, as with any censorship of the online space, there are some sneaky ways to get past it. Those in China who do want to access blocked sites, do have some workarounds via proxy servers and the like. And, so far at least, some third party apps for accessing Twitter are still accessible in China.

If you’re curious, Wikipedia keeps a mostly up-to-date list of notable websites blocked in China. It also includes information about several sites, like the New York Times, that have previously been blocked but are now available. That would tend to imply that the government there does re-assess their online censorship policy from time to time, so it will be interesting to see how long they keep Twitter and other social networks on the ban list.

Related posts:

1. Ashton Kutcher has more to say than CNN
2. The Great Firewall of China extends a little further
3. Ahmadinejad vs. Anonymous

Tags: censorship, China, Social Media, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 11:17 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.