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Yesterday, at just after 5 p.m., China blocked access to Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail. This is in addition to Youtube (that has been blocked for months) and the more recent block of Blogspot, amongst many others. Two days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China chose to attempt to silence the people. It looks like as of right now, the plan hasn’t exactly worked out according to plan. First off – web surfers are tech savvy here, and many, in mere minutes after being blocked, were back on Twitter, after logging in through proxies or private VPN networks (myself included). And people were peeved. The strangest thing to me is that had the censors just let things lie, and continued on as normal, there is a good chance nothing would have happened. Despite all the news reports, I’m not feeling the tension that keeps being reported on. In addition to that, although China has an incredible number of internet users, 298 million, Twitter isn’t as popular in China as it is in North America. Yet, by drawing attention to it – through the blocking – they’ve gone and pissed off people, including a whack of journalists worldwide who are particularly interested in writing stories about any news blips in China at the moment. If China wants to stop having the West “beat up on them” perhaps their censors should stop pulling stunts that continually discredit the government. Then again, maybe they don’t care at all.
