June 13, 2007
Flickr falls afoul of China’s Great Firewall
Fans of the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing website Flickr.com have been struggling to access any of its images in recent days, and the company says it seems Beijing’s censors are to blame.
Nothing too surprising there: China’s Communist party blocks thousands of international sites, even though the secretive culture commissars generally go easier on ones that like Flickr are in foreign languages and run by big internet names.
The censors never explain themselves, but Flickr may have drawn their fire for hosting photographs of the Chinese army’s brutal suppression of student-led protests centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. China’s digital scissors are always extra busy around the anniversary of the killings on June 4 every year. Flickr has also allowed users in China to see photographs of more recent protests that local media have been barred from reporting on.
What’s interesting about this case is that the censors have refrained from simply blocking the whole Flickr site, which can still be access from within China, but have instead merely prevented it from displaying pictures. Page-links and text can still be seen.
It is a relatively subtle approach that highlights the Chinese government’s sophisticated approach to internet control - but not one likely to be of much comfort to a photo-sharing website.
