China’s Firewall Blocks Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Live, Bing

Thursday is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and as a foretaste, Chinese users were denied access to Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, Livejournal, Tumblr, the Huffington Post and Microsoft's Live.com, Hotmail, its MSN Space blog tool and its new search engine Bing, according to various reports.

Chinese blog Very Yellow, Very Violent also threw up a temporary solution for accessing Twitter:

It suggests adding that line to your hosts file, at the above locations in Windows and Linux/Mac. Unfortunately, having tried it, I don’t think it works.

If you’re looking for more options, however, be sure NOT to listen to the sage guidance offered by Right, like anyone currently blocked is able to use Twitter Search to search for tweets about VPNs and Hot Spot Shield. Smart. Good job, Mashable.

The Times of London noted that Twitter has let Chinese users write terms that are blocked on Web sites, such as "6/4" for the date of the Tiananmen massacre or "Charter 08" for a well-known pro-democracy dissident manifesto.

"Twitter is a new thing in China. The censors need time to figure out what it is," blogger Michael Anti told another Chinese blog last week, according to the Times. "So enjoy the last happy days of twittering before the fate of YouTube descends on it one day."

Indeed, one would imagine that doing so would only clue the ignorant masses that something was amiss, further spurring their curiosity to find out just what’s got the government’s giant knickers in a bunch.

If nothing else, these blocks might annoy the foreigner population that regularly use these websites enough to inspire them to campaign even more fervently to their surrounding Chinese the information that has been veiled from their eyes and minds.

Related Posts