Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and other sites blocked in the country, ahead of Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary

Jun 2, 2009 12:12 GMT  ·  By
Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail blocked in China ahead of Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary
   Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail blocked in China ahead of Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary

China is well known for its online censorship and for taking down even major sites. But two days before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Great Firewall of China has taken its efforts to a new level – Twitter, Flickr and a number of Microsoft services have been blocked.

First to go was the micro-blogging site Twitter, which has seen a rise in popularity in China as well as everywhere else. Some users are apparently still able to use the service via third-party clients but the main site is inaccessible. Twitter was followed by the photo sharing service Flickr, which saw outages before in the country, usually around sensitive dates for the Chinese government. Less expected was the blocking of Microsoft's email service Hotmail as well its new search engine Bing and MSN spaces. All this comes after YouTube has been blocked for several weeks.

Twitter has been proving very popular in China especially since it was able to circumvent the country's blocking of many words and phrases like the ones related to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Interestingly enough, Chinese blogger and New York Times researcher Michael Anti predicted the blocking of Twitter in the area just a few days ago.

“Twitter is a new thing in China. The censors need time to figure out what it is. So enjoy the last happy days of twittering before the fate of Youtube descends on it one day.” he said. “I want to point out that the Chinese Twitterland is funnier than the English one, for a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language. 140 Chinese characters can make up all the full elements of a news piece with the "5 Ws" (Who, What, Where, When and HoW). But the joy of the Chinese Twitterland is more fragile, and I hope that it will live longer in this country.”