China is blocking coverage of Egypt protests on Twitter-like services
As social media fanned the flames of protests in Tunisia and Egypt, authoritarian governments around the world began quaking. The latest sign of that is that China is trying to limit public knowledge of the unrest in Egypt.Over the weekend, Chinese Twitter-like services run by Sina, Tencent and Sohu blocked the word “Egypt” from being used in microblogging messages passed around by users. A search for “Egypt” on Sina brings up a message saying, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.”
The services have hundreds of millions of users. Clearly, the Communist rulers don’t want China’s own youths to get any ideas about staging a popular revolt. China already had a huge problem with that when it quelled the Tiananmen Square protests. If microblogging had been around in those days, as well as text messages, maybe things might have turned out differently, as they did in Tunisia.
The Egyptian government has been trying to stop protests from being organized by shutting down the internet. So far, it hasn’t worked. Clearly, China doesn’t want to wait for troubles to start and it’s being proactive.