Flickr’s almost banned in China
Chinese bloggers resonated a lot today on Flickr’s disability in China. They talked over Twittersphere and blogosphere with angers. Currently, the flickr.com is not blocked but the image repository server(farm1.flickr.com and farm2.flickr.com). It means the blockage is not whole domain as target, but some subdomains which may be referred most by Chinese blogosphere recently on those “sensitive” contents. Generally, June is very sensitive month because of Tian’anmen crackdown 18 years ago. And more this year, there were a protest over PX chemistry project in xiamen, as well the the passing away of vice primier, Huang Ju. All these cases caused authority in nervous and headache because of the flood of voices online. Flickr, as one of the most favorite photo sharing service, was definitely the first target of being censored because there are many photos and pictures related to above cases. Right now, people can still access flickr web site but can’t see any pictures there.
But things is not simple as censorship itself. Bloggers has raised more online protests with their rages. Today, more and more people in China knows what GFW is. They expressed a new flood of online protest after finding flickr image server was blocked. Some posts has directly blamed the Communist Party, with disapointment and even cursing it’s crash. We may see more flood of reactions over this case. It’s could be even a turning point that pushing the authority to change their Internet policies, either tougher or looser(impossible). It depends on the depth of emergent power shifting. Who knows. What we have realized that the date CPC crash will be very close after GFW crash(someday near 2015? only guess and wish) becasues they are very agile indeed.
