China blocks internet news about Tibet

The Times writes about increased internet censorship in China following the events in Tibet:

China has closed down access to several of the world’s most popular websites in an apparent attempt to censor international coverage of the violence that is unfolding in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

YouTube, the video-sharing website which has become a home to amateur footage of news events, has been blocked to Chinese users since Saturday, and there are also reports that the news pages of Yahoo!, the internet portal, have been made inaccessible.

In addition, the entire Guardian website has been closed down as of today, and other sites - including Times Online - have had access to their coverage of recent events in Tibet severely restricted.

Popular sites which assimilate news from different sources - such as Google News - have been subject to what is known as ‘keyword filtering’, where a Chinese internet user attempting to load a page which contains words such as ‘Tibet’ or ‘Dalai Lama’ will see the site stall.

Times Online has also learned that the editors of some of the most popular ‘forum’ - or bulletin board - sites in China have been directly contacted by government officials and told not to publish any content relating to the recent protests.

Flickr, the photo-sharing website, Wikipedia, and the LA Times, the US newspaper, are among the other sites to which access has been cut off.

“There’s definitely been a ramping up of keyword filtering in recent days, particularly for words like Tibet and protest,” said Jeremy Goldkorn, the editor of danwei.org, a site which translates news from various Chinese sources into English. “The whole internet has also slowed down, which is almost certainly connected with authorities’ attempts to censor content.”

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