The Great Firewall of China has a new Target: Foursquare. The Chinese government has blocked access to the social networking tool, apparently because too many people were checking in to Tiananmen Square. This ban comes on the 21st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
On June 4, 1989, more than 3,000 protesters and students were killed by the Chinese government for protesting against communism. The incident remains a difficult subject for the Chinese government, and discussion of the massacre or the protests is strictly forbidden in mainland China. This ban, of course, extends to the Internet.
Although information about the event is strictly limited to the official government point of view — even Google agreed to censor the incident from its Chinese search offerings back in 2006 — the rise of social networking has made it more and more difficult to quash all mentions of the topic, especially when the anniversary date approaches.
Last year, in the days leading up to the 20th anniversary of the incident, the Chinese government blocked access to Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail.
This year, protesters got a little more creative, checking into Tiananmen Square using Foursquare and leaving, as Techblog86 calls it, “sensitive comments” in place of tips. What’s interesting is that it appears that the Chinese government may have become aware of how Foursquare was being used because of the re-publishing of checkins to other services like Twitter and Facebook.
In any event, mainland China is now blocked from accessing Foursquare. We assume that in a few days the ban will be lifted, at least until the next unapproved outbreak of discussion.
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