China Censors Facebook, Other Sites Following Xinjiang Riots

I am sitting in a Beijing hotel right now and I can't get on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Wordpress or Youtube.

While this is only a tiny tragedy compared to the 184 deaths in Xinjiang on Sunday, this mass blockage is a study in the Chinese government's attempts to make sure its version of the story is the one that gets out.

These days, CCTV, the state television station, is saturated with reports of how the government is helping Xinjiang citizens in the aftermath of the riots. There are soundbites galore from Uighers and Han Chinese alike saying they only wish for peace for everyone.

What is absent in the Chinese media is any discussion of the real reasons behind the riots.

The funny thing is that a seemingly harmless site like Facebook has been blocked. It seems unlikely that dissidents in Xinjiang would choose this bastion of American youth as their medium of choice. And it's darn frustrating for a Facebook-addicted American who wants to do some completely Xinjiang unrelated Facebook surfing.

However, it just shows the lengths the Chinese government will go to ensure any unsanctioned information does not get out. With China's more popular social media sites already blocked, dissidents have been moving to other sites, such as Twitter, to get their message out. It's a constant game of tag: Twitter and Facebook were just blocked after the riots. Wordpress and Youtube have long been blocked.

The Internet as a whole has been patchy since the riots broke. There are a lot of sites that you can access sometimes, but not other times, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of rhyme or reason as to which ones are blocked and when. You can tell a site is blocked when you get the message on your screen that the server is not responding. Of course, the government isn't going come out and say it is blocking Web sites.

Google and its associated functions (Gmail, for instance) were also blocked a while back, but can be accessed most of the time these days, at least from the places I've been.

I haven't found any news sites blocked so far, which is interesting, because a whole lot of the things blocked on blogs can be accessed on American news Web sites. So I still know what's going on in Xinjiang from an American perspective...although that's not to say American reports aren't skewed, too.