China blocks social media ahead of Tiananmen anniversary

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BEIJING - Two days before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, mainland netizens have been blocked from using social networking sites including Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Microsoft's new search engine Bing.

According to China sources, Twitter became inaccessible in the country at 5pm on Tuesday, widely noticed to be blocked after access of popular external programmes Tweet Deck and Twhirl also became patchy or non-existent.

“We started to notice an even more random and broader approach to website filtering in Beijing over the long weekend just passed. Those of us in the China marketing community are accustomed to heavy-handed filtering of blameless as well as politically sensitive websites, but this week, with the 20th anniversary on Thursday, has largely rendered the web unusable for us,” said Simon Cousins, chief executive of PR agency Illuminant Partners, describing the internet’s performance as “off kilter” all week.

“This latest block of Twitter and Flickr really hurts us, and our ability to service our clients in the mainland. They’re both important business tools.”

Cousins added that access to Tweetie, an iPhone application, via China Mobile was also blocked.

A Beijing-based agency source added that the 2 June blockage was “particularly bad” because his company’s external server based in San Francisco was also unable to process requests for Twitter and Flickr URLs.

The block is a setback for Bing, which only debuted its Chinese-language site this week.

The event followed reports that users on social networking sites also experienced difficulty as pages either stalled or had delayed loading times.

A representative from Yahoo, owner of Flickr, could not be reached in time for press.