Great Firewall of China Blocked Twitter, Bing & Many Websites

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China has the highest number of Internet users in the world along with a booming economy and that explains why American web companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft co-operate wholeheartedly with the Chinese government in implementing search engine key words blockage.

For instance, Google shows a different set of search results in China to keep the communists happy, Microsoft is known to block blog entries that contain banned keywords while Yahoo has been accused of helping Beijing arrest an innocent journalist by providing details of his personal email account.

YouTube has been blocked for some time and Wikipedia was blocked for a while, Today Chinese authorities have brought the the Great Wall of China on a number of services including Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live.com, Hotmail, Blogger and many more websites. The API to Twitter, used by clients like TweetDeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, has also been affected.

business people, entrepreneurs and social commentators having contacts and work out side of China, will majorly get effect by this step.

According to early reports on Twitter & blogs. It seems that the Chinese authorities want to quiet down the entire major social networking and social media part of the web ahead of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen massacre on June 4th.

Recently, An employee of Baidu, the Google of China, has leaked a document folder that suggests in detail how authorities in China censor the Internet. Some of the words are as under:
  • Chinese Communist Party, Ruling government
  • Puppet government, One-party system
  • Dictatorship, tyranny
  • Human rights in China & Freedom of expression
  • Gao Zhisheng (Chinese lawyer and activist)
  • Falun Gong (Banned cult in China founded by Li Hongzhi)
  • Keywords related to Military, Gambling, Brainwashing & Sex
  • Kidney harvesting from live people, Organ Sale
  • Tiananmen Square Massacre
  • Tibet, Taiwan Independence
  • Cheating in Examinations, Fake Diploma courses
  • How to make bombs, counterfeit money and so on.
Automattic, the company behind the popular WordPress blogging software, faced a similar moral dilemma in 2006 when China suddenly blocked access to all WordPress.com blogs inside the mainland.

Matt told AFP that ban on WordPress in China could have been lifted had he agreed to block certain words or topics and give up information to the Chinese communist government about WordPress users.

Unlike other giants, WordPress took a more ethical stand refusing to comply with the Chinese diktats and WP blogs therefore still remain blocked in China. The situation is likely to stay the same forever unless China relaxes their censorship laws which again sounds like a remote possibility.

What to do Now?

The advantage with blogs & Twitter is that they all provide RSS feeds so you can easily read any blog & Twitter Updates using a web based feed readers or Desktop reader even if the main site is blocked.It can work with any blog or website which provides RSS feeds like Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, Digg, Bing, YouTube

In case of blogs or Website, you can use this website ".nyud.net" to the blog URL and it should open just fine. For instance, if the main blog is located at WeboLobby.com, you can access a mirror image of this site from WeboLobby.com.nyud.net. If that doesn’t solve the problem, here are some more ways to access blocked sites Wordpress.com & Blogger blogs both support post by email so Chinese bloggers can publish new content on WordPress & Blogger blogs using any of the email programs.

Also you can find more ways to access the websites with diffrent ways here & here. It's twitter links , Of Course twitter is blocked so use search.twitter.com.nyud.net for the same keywords.

Update: Some user updated that twitter works on http://threadedtweets.com may be it will work for you , let me know about it

Update: Twitter works with Topify which allow to send reply and DM via emails so user can use it via email, Well Hotmail is blocked so try other email programs use Topify

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