Apparently, Twitter and many other social networks were blocked in China in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. According to Mashable, the networks included Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr and others. Also included were local sites such as Fanfou, Xiaonei and Wordku, although these said they were closed for maintenance.
The blocking of these networks must have been frustrating for a lot of people, to say the least! I can only imagine the uproar that would occur if the government tried to block or filter the internet in Australia.
Oh, hold on a second, there has been a debate going on in this country about the government introducing a contentious plan to force internet service providers to filter the internet to a certain (or rather uncertain) extent. Talk of this kind of censorship raises quite a few questions. How is it decided what gets censored and what doesn’t? Who decides? Where do you draw the line in a medium that is constantly being updated and changed? Is any system for censoring the internet workable in practice? Is it healthy for a democracy to begin censoring the internet at all?
The plan by the Australian government to filter the internet is one thing, blocking whole social networks for days at a time for political reasons is quite another.
