Over the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, China’s censorship authorities were working overtime, blocking access to Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, and other popular sites. Attempting to squelch information and opinion that would damage China’s Communist Party’s reputation, the CCP even “detained a number of political dissidents seen as threats to public order during the anniversary period,” the New York Times reported.
According to Reporter Without Borders, “The information blackout has been enforced so effectively for 20 years that most young Chinese are completely unaware of this major event.” “Twenty years later, it is still impossible for the Chinese media to refer freely to the ruthless suppression of China’s pro-democracy movement in June 1989.”
Government censorship, however, appears to be no match for a growing number of tech-savvy citizens, accessing foreign proxies and continuing to ‘tweet’ about that June 4 “incident”. See more from China National News and the BBC:
China this week blocked access to Twitter, Bing.com, the photo-sharing Web site Flickr and, briefly, Hotmail. Other sites, including YouTube and blog providers like Blogspot and Wordpress, are routinely barred. But frequent Twittering and Facebooking from Chinese users on the eve of the June 4 anniversary proved there are many ways around the censors’ efforts. (continue to the article)
Twitterers defy China’s firewall [BBC]
Frequent twittering from users in China has contributed to Tiananmen becoming one of Twitter’s most discussed topics during the anniversary. One twitterer wrote: “I cried when I watched a video about 4 June 1989. All my memory came back. We are living inside a big wall, like in prison.” (continue to the article)