Yahoo Says Chinese Government Blocking Flickr

Yahoo’s Hong Kong division declared yesterday that the Chinese government is likely blocking the country’s 140 million Web users from Flickr.com, the Yahoo-owned popular photo-sharing site. Flickr has not shown photos to users in mainland China since last week, amid speculation that Beijing censored the site after images of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre were posted. The communist government of China has banned all references to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in state media, the Internet and books.

Officials from China’s Ministry of Information Industry were unable for comment yesterday. In China it is very much taboo to discuss the massacre that killed thousands when the government called in the army to cut the head off the democracy movement.

So here we have yet another bout in the fight against online censorship. Back in March I wrote about a Chinese university dean who was fired over a blog entry. And it seems the Chinese government has not come very far since then. What’s even worse with this scenario though is that this is offline as well. Given that the Chinese government has forbid all discussion of the massacre on any medium, one can assume a fair amount of the public — over a billion in China — doesn’t even know about it. And worse than not being able to talk about it is not even knowing about it at all. I await the day that the Chinese population gets sick of communism and attains a free, democratic society through revolution. It’s bound to happen one day…