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Actually, you can blame this one directly on political fear. Recently, video footage of Chinese police savagely beating prone Tibetan protesters got posted ont
by megaduck 18y ago
Actually, you can blame this one directly on political fear. Recently, video footage of Chinese police savagely beating prone Tibetan protesters got posted onto YouTube. Next thing you know, WHAM! Blocked.
There's a lot of precedent for this, too. The government blocked the whole iTunes store when a music single with the word "Tibet" in it hit the front page. They frequently ban news sites whenever news from Tibet (especially negative news) hits. It doesn't last forever, though. After things simmer down, they'll usually lift the general block and just keep targeted blocks on specific stories or pages.
I'm hoping YouTube comes back soon. Sometimes domains that were totally banned spontaneously become free and clear. Any blogs hosted by Wordpress were blocked until this last week. Now, no problem. Same thing with Andrew Sullivan's blog, and half a dozen other sites. I think it's just to keep people guessing.
- electromagnetic 18y agoI think it could also be that whenever something pops up they don't like they review the entire site. If someone says 'Free Tibet!' on blogger and it gets too popular, they'll block the whole of blogger until they've got their targets down to specific blogs and pages, then they can unblock the entire thing. IMO, if they're doing that, it's a very smart system of reducing dissent. I completely disagree with it, but then I grew up in a western country. I'm also not too ignorant to call China evil for doing so, they've made colossal strides in the past 50 years and perhaps in the long run this will be good for the country as a whole, potentially the worst thing that could happen is a civil war involving 1.3 billion people.