(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Amid the government’s increasingly bold control of citizens’ web access, China has pulled the plug on several sites and parts of popular portals that may have served as a platform for politically sensitive material.
According to an Associated Press report, the Tuesday shut down of Digu and Zuosa, two Chinese website that offer micro-blogging services similar to Twitter, were the latest tactic in the government’s closure of thousands of sites in its campaign against online porn this year, which has also included arresting dozens of site operators.
China has already already cut off mainland access to Facebook, Twitter and other well-known social networking sites. This latest bout of shut downs may be intended to clean the Internet of offensive material before this fall when the People’s Republic of China will celebrate its 60th year.
A Digu spokeswoman told the AP that some users had tried to post “politically sensitive material,” which the company had to censor. She said that the site is offline for at least a week for maintenance.
The technology channels of the popular Sina and Netease portals were also shut down because they allegedly posted news about a corruption probe without attaining clearance from state censors.
Not only political material, however, is being censored, but anything the government deems an assault on cultural values such as pornography, which is illegal in China. Earlier in the month, Chinese porn site owners were detained or arrested even after migrating their sites to foreign servers in an effort to hide their activity from police. The government has also proposed a plan to install porn-filtering software on all new PCs.
Despite government efforts to block users from pornography and subversive material, China had 338 million Internet users at the end of June, according to Chinese government data released last week. The number users who watched online videos rose 10 percent in the past six months. Also, more than a fourth of users now shop online.
Refusing to have their content filtered, however, crafty Chinese Internet users often use virtual private networks and overseas proxy servers to circumvent the government, letting them access forbidden content by masking their online identity with a foreign IP address.
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