VentureBeat is reporting that LinkedIn is now blocked in China, joining Twitter and Facebook as major social networking sites that have been caught by the “Great Firewall of China.” The popular belief for the reasoning behind this blockage is that LinkedIn acts as sort of a proxy Twitter client, since users can post and read status messages from Twitter.
It’s no surprise that the Chinese government is a little ban-happy these days due to the recent revolutions in Egypt and Libya. Over the weekend, a small group of dissidents tried to organize a peaceful protest at the Wangfujing shopping district in Beijing called the “jasmine revolution.” The roots of the protest started on websites and moved on to being organized via Twitter. Despite being blocked, craft individuals can still access banned sites through the use of VPNs or other tunneling solutions.
Time Magazine talked to Nicholas Bequelin, Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watched:
“Information is growing faster than censorship,” he says. “I don’t believe that the Internet itself will bring democracy to China, but it changes people’s attitudes and the association between themselves and the rest of the world. It’s an important shift in people’s minds.”
They then went on to conclude:
The government won this skirmish and looks capable of blocking any immediate threats to its hold on power. But the ease with which dissent spreads online means that while China isn’t likely to see its own jasmine revolution, the authorities won’t be resting easily either.
As of now, the Chinese government has censored keyword searches relating to “jasmine,” which kinda sucks if you live in China and your name is Jasmine or you suddenly feel the urge to look for pictures of the princess from Aladdin. You’d be in good company with U.S. Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, who also got his name banned from keyword searches because he was “coincidentally there” at Wangfujing at the exact time the “jasmine revolution” was about to take place:
If you were wondering about the chippy annotations tone for the video, it’s because it was produced by Chinese nationalists for the website M4.cn. They’ve been highly critical of Western news coverage since their previous incarnation as Anti-CNN.com, which was famous for pointing out the inaccuracies in Western coverage of the Tibetan unrest in 2008. They also know how to pilfer awesome Western movies for their video soundtracks. I mean, seriously, The Rock has got to be Nic Cage’s best movie ever, right? At the very least, that soundtrack gets me pumped to do almost anything.
