Lately I've been seeing ads along the side of my facebook page for something like "before you go to China, make sure you get your FB key." I tried in vain just now to get that ad to reappear so that I could be more specific, but all it wants to inform me about in my ad bar today is Britain and lemonade. So anyway, this ad stuck in the back of my mind. Mostly because I couldn't figure out what FB meant, and I wondered what weird things China was up to. Yeah, I know...all synapses were not firing in my brain. And if they aren't in yours either, FB, as I finally realized, is Facebook.
So, it turns out that Facebook is banned in China. Not just Facebook, but all of the following online resources (as well as many, many others):
- The New York Times
- Twitter
- You Tube
- Picasa
- Dropbox
- Flickr
- Foursquare
- Hotmail
China actually started censoring the Internet by creating the Golden Shield Project in 1998. Since then they've been continually adding (and occasionally removing) website access. From what I can tell, this really became an issue mid 2009 after a fatal riot in the Xinjiang province in China. Although websites had been blocked before this incident, the upheaval further fueled China's censorship and caused an increase of their firewall.
There are of course ways to get around the blocks, which I will not discuss. Just seems a little on the iffy side of the law. But you can test a website here to see if you'll be able to access it in China. But seriously...you're in China, why are you messing around on Facebook?
PS - China isn't alone in Internet blocking. The OpenNet Initiative recently found that out of 40 countries studied, 25 of them practiced Internet censorship. Read the full article here.
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