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.”