Good thing I shaved my head this week. Otherwise I’d be yanking my hair out about now. Here’s a photo the Net Nanny ought to see:

Yee reported last night that Flickr’s photo feed is blocked in China. The site itself is still running, but photos come up as empty boxes.

John Kennedy of Global Voices links the Net Nanny’s latest temper tantrum to recent protests in Xiamen, where photos of the anti-PX rallies made their way to the photo sharing site.

Yee agrees:

Any reasons of baning this excellent photos share websites? So many! Especially in this June, like Xiamen people’s march against PX project happened on 1st June and someone did a live report of the whole process on flickr.

I wonder what this will mean for Yahoo’s plan to create a Chinese Flickr.

Update: The San Francisco Chronicle has a story on the blocking (h/t China Webmasters), though it makes no mention of the Xiamen protests and the role Flickr may have played there.

The Web site also hosts a smattering of images that may be frowned upon by Chinese censors, including student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which includes the famous photo of a man blocking the progress of Chinese army tanks, and bodies of students who were killed in the streets as part of a government crackdown.

China’s tight control over the Internet has become a high-profile issue in recent years as the online world makes increasing inroads with its vast population. Authorities routinely block access to online information about political opposition groups, Taiwanese independence and overseas Web sites such as BBC News, prompting outrage from human rights advocates.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.