When I heard that in China the government had blocked Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google and then I also heard the country was 'leading the way' when it came to social media, I was very confused. But after watching a speech by Chinese blogger Michael Anti, it all became clear to me. China, as Anti says, likes to block and copy. Block all of these social networking sites and then create new copycat versions that are solely operated within China so that the government can access the information anytime they want.
Michael Anti's speech about the firewall in China
The firewall was introduced in December 2012. It blocks social media websites, certain Wikipedia and news articles and sites such as pornographic sites or religious sites. It is rumoured that there is over 30,000 internet police in China, closely monitoring searches and sites visited (backgroundcheck.org, 2013). And users that try hard enough to bypass the firewall can be reported to authorities.
So whilst in one hand it seems really bad the Chinese cant access world news and contact easily with people from other countries, in a way it also doesn't seem that bad, because they still use other versions of this site, they can just only communicate with each other.
Government censorship like this would not be accepted freely by citizens of Australia, as we are a democracy and it is our right to be able to access a fair level of information. But it seems that for many of the Chinese, it doesn't affect their little world too much.
I don't know what to predict of the firewall in the future, as it has not been running for too long now, but I would say that with a few improvements to leniency, it might just stick around for quite a while to come.
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