Sinobytes

Why China's "Great Firewall" is so anti-social (networking)...

Sep 11, 2009 17:51

2009 in China has turned out to be the year of heightened Web censorship, implemented by the nationwide filtering system known--not very affectionately--as "The Great Firewall".

Many hoped that the Beijing Olympics of 2008 would speed up a cultural opening up to the world, which has lagged behind the economic opening up which began in the 1980s. Alas, recent events have caused the authorities to get very nervous about open and fast-paced sharing of information, with social-networking sites mostly being the victims of Web blockages, from June or July this year to the present.

A quick search of Twitter trends for the hashtags #gfw--"Great Firewall"--or #fuckgfw, I think you can guess what that means, reveals the frustrations of thousands of tech-savvy Chinese and expatriate Netizens as they battle against the Great Firewall, sharing information about what sites have been newly stung, and methods of getting around the site/service blockage.

Can a caged Twitter bird sing?
Twitter itself has been blocked in China since July 6, when it was implicated in--allegedly--spreading information which stoked the recent unrest in the Xinjiang province. But it remains accessible to most of its more hardcore users who have realized that a variety of Twitter Web apps, such as HootSuite, Hahlo, TwitZap, iTweet and Dabr, allow full access to Twitter because they do not go via the blocked twitter.com URL.

Facebook got blocked on the same day as Twitter, for the same apparent reasons. One Chinese casualty on that day was the Chinese Twitter clone called Fanfou. Being a local site, it can be totally shut down under Chinese law--which seems to have been the case, with no chance of Fanfou reappearing.

Goodbye YouTube
YouTube vanished a month earlier, in June, on the highly sensitive 10th anniversary of the events of Tian'anmen Square on March 24th after a few days of unrest in Tibet. Google's video-sharing site was also punished with a nationwide white-out last year, during the first wave of unrest in Tibet. (For a full list of sites currently "vanished", please scroll down to the bottom of this post).

So, it's clear the Great Firewall is very sensitive--mainly scared of videos, images and the free flow of real-time information. Online newspapers are largely unscathed, since--I'm guessing--text in a foreign language is not so much a threat as high-impact videos and photos.

How does it work then? It's not all text robots scouring for sensitive words in Chinese, English and other languages. On the contrary, the Great Firewall is kept up with a lot of manpower, with reports of as many as 30,000 to 40,000 individuals--government civil servants, essentially--being employed in its hundreds of regional centers.

Chinese Web sites, particularly the lively bulletin boards and video-sharing sites, are undoubtedly under constant surveillance: A controversial posting, photo or video (either politically sensitive or sexually obscene) can be taken down in less than an hour. That's where the manpower comes in. Since content cannot be removed from foreign Web sites which are outside of Chinese jurisdiction, the only option for the censors is to hit the big red button that makes a whole Web site vanish inside China.

Sensitive
One more "sensitive" time fast approaching is the 60th anniversary of the Republic of China, on October 1. The hope among Chinese Net users who are aware of the reason for the Web blockages is that once October 1 has passed, there'll be an easing of the Internet restrictions on social-networking sites.

Here's a very up-to-date list of all the Web 2.0 and social-networking sites that are kaput in China:

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Posterous blogs
Blogger blogs (a.k.a. Google's Blogspot service)
Wordpress free blogs
Typepad blogs
LiveJournal blogs
Opera blogs
Tumblr
LiveLeak
DailyMotion
ImageShack
Google's Picasa Web Albums (login accessible, but borked thereafter, and photos inaccessible)
Google Image search results (very frequent reset connections)
Orkut
Bebo

On the plus side, Flickr is back, and so are the Huffington Post and the free Blog.com service.

Of course, an overseas VPN solves all these issues with blocked sites, but it's a practical solution that only a minority of Web users in China know about and can afford to access, presuming that a safe, fast VPN which supports "https" and offers a lot of bandwidth is a paid solution.

So, roll on the next major national event: The nation and Party's 60th anniversary. Because we can only hope that after that celebration the Internet will start to get a bit more social again. It certainly can't get any more anti-social.

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