China Blocks Twitter Ahead Of Tiananmen Anniversary

China is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown with another crackdown -- a massive block on Twitter and all those social media sites that pose a threat to China's government this week. The Chinese media site Danwei reported early Tuesday morning that Twitter, the popular microblogging site, has been disabled in mainland China. Thursday, June 4th marks the 20th anniversary of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and the brutal response by the Chinese government that left hundreds dead.

As the morning moved on, China-based bloggers realized that YouTube, Flickr and Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, had also been blocked. Reuters reported this morning that China even blocked Hotmail and Windows Live, both sites owned by Microsoft. As the Shanghaiist put it, "Microsoft can't catch a break here, can they?

While it is common for the Chinese government to block websites deemed controversial before major events, like Thursday's Tiananmen anniversary, the massive block today is the first widespread censorship of social media -- a tacit acknowledgment of two things: Twitter's new power in mainland China, and how valuable Twitter would be as platform to publish original news out of mainland China on the Tiananmen anniversary. Now, or at least until the protests and noise surrounding the anniversary subside, Twitterers in China will not be able to tweet.

Other than Twitter, the list of sites currently blocked in mainland China includes YouTube, Blogspot, Tumblr, Livejournal, Flickr, Microsoft's Live.com and this one, the Huffington Post.

Comments

[saraglobal]

Chinas new screening software: To filter out pornographic or violent material. or stop Chinese internet users searching for politically sensitive information.
Vote here:
http://www.thisisdiversity.com/discussion/the-great-firewall-of-china/117/

[KarateKid]

Their youngsters will find a workaround, just like we do in these blogs. LOL

[Tracy Farr]

The thought of 1.3 billiion twitterpated Chinese Twitterers tweeting in Mandarin is just too much to fathom.

[Steve Real]

The Communist Party of China doesn’t want the truth.
They can’t handle the truth.
Free speech is way more powerful then anything Mao’s “Little Red Book”
could ever achieve in modern China.
The poor Chinese are being muffled and stifled by their own government.
The Communist Chinese just can’t handle the truth,
because they are so ashamed of the 3000 people they murdered that day on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square.
Let freedom ring!

[buzzcowboy]

Weirdly, an old post I wrote about the Beijing Olympics has been seeing a lot of traffic for the past couple weeks... coincidence?

http://blog.cafepress.com/2009/06/02/not-so-huge-in-china/

Hmm.

[FairTalk]

Not coincidence. People cannot resist China bashing, as it is the onle permitted racism in America today!

[FairTalk]

Good for China! No one wants to see more incitement of riots ad violence.

[wereeverywhere]

Yeah, nobody would want to see the leaders of the work camp that is China who viciously exploit and abuse their own populace brought to justice. Nobody would want to see tyrants face justice from their own people. Well almost nobody.

[munki]

PEACE...

[FairTalk]

Just in case anyone is interested...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbX0gAk3zRA

[indy100]

Yeah good for China. Who needs freedom of speech, thought or action anyway right? And you'll be moving to China to enjoy this type of society when??

[FairTalk]

:) I lived in China at the time, and I know what and how it happened.

[z78pb45]

China should find a nice mountain of granite close to Beijing and put Reagan/Bus­h/Clinton/­Bush up for a shiny new Mt. Rushmore East. On this anniversary of total human rights wipeout victory for Chinese communism, don't forget Hu Jia (the bravest blogger that bloggers don't speak up for) who didn't do anything wrong yet still rots in a jail denied his wife and baby. http://hujiajinyan.wordpress.com/

[LMPE]

Hopefully they also block Fixed News.

[avocados]

America : Made in China
America: Owned by China

Of course the US and China need each other. They make and we buy. With a work force of 1 billion and a currency value that is being controlled by the Chinese gov't makes a good recipe for successful exports.

Very sad. I've been to China a few times. Fantastic people and a rich fascinating history. It was kind of nice to be in a country where no one talks about politics (of course not by choice). It's a dictatorship and a capitalist communist country - fascinating. A world without Twitter sounds great (just kidding).
The Chinese people are resilient and I hope they will work their way to a freer society where they can express their thoughts and ideas. Ironically there has been a great art scene in China. On my last visit there I visited a collection of art galleries that are housed in a former Russian weapons factory. I also visited a Maoist cold war era bomb shelter that would have house 300,00 people. Fascinating.

[Freenation]

well some people learn, the more you suppress the more it gets out of control....

[Freenation]

well some people 'never' learn...

[SFkid]

Thank God China, at least somebody has the sense to be irritated by having to read constant babble of peoples minute by minute rants.

[tootsie1]

You mean Communist China...the country that has us in their grips? Go figger...

[happycat]

I hate Twitter. It should be banned everywhere.

[babyiem]

I'm Chinese

[geedeck]

Everyone is missing the big, fat, really freaking important point.

You can't block Twitter.

At least not in an effective way, that is. Twitter can take input from sms and web-api interfaces, technology shorthand for giant freaking swiss army knife. China can place blocks, but I could educate anyone here how to work around in 30 minutes. Web proxy. Email proxy. Grey market SMS/SIM card solutions. Morse freaking code.

The reason twitter is important is in how irrelevant it seems. The seeming uselessness in which people blog about everyday stuff in their life breaks down writing barriers to nearly nothing. What value is that, you ask? It means that people who wouldn't normally use it, do, and in the process become little journalists. Individually, they don't paint a picture, but dozens, hundreds together they can paint honest portraits.

An online community I help moderate (shacknews.com) has a forum format actually not far from twitter, and when big news goes down, there's a good chance I'll hear it there first, be it an earthquake in California or China, sports events, I even found out about 9/11 from there first. Is it journalism that would take down Nixon? No. But for first/early contact in events,it rules.

The point I'm trying to make, is that the online space is transforming, and real censorship is going to be harder and harder. Eventually that rope is going to slip free of the chinese government, and it will never come back.