According to Danwei, a popular Chinese media, advertising, and urban life blog, the following sites are now blocked in China. Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, Live and Bing. It appears that Bing, the new Microsoft search engine is being blocked because it is “autoplaying Youtube videos when you put your mouse over them.” Kaiser Kuo, digital guru and former blogger at Ogilvy’s Digital Watch said in an interview with Reuters, “The whole Twitter community in China has been exploding with it.” He added, “It’s just part of life here. If anything surprises me, it’s that it took them so long.”

This action comes ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Also there are the recently released memoirs of Zhao Ziyang’s based on conversations with a close friend of his during his many years under house arrest. Zhao Ziyang was the was prime minister and party general secretary of nine years until he was purged after he refused to sanction the crackdown and massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square. The US Congress called Tuesday on China to launch a UN-backed probe of its crackdown and to free all political prisoners.

As reported earlier on Multilingual Search, a set of internal working documents from the censorship department at Baidu, China’s largest search engine, were recently leaked. China often blocks sites and then removes the blocks after what perhaps may be an adjustment to their filters. A China Digital Times post includes a comprehensive list of the websites that are being censored by Baidu.

Related Articles