China blocks Twitter, other sites prior to June 4

Thinking of tweeting during the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre? Keep your iPhone to yourself. Chinese authorities have stepped up censorship ahead of the sensitive June 4 anniversary.

Twitter has been blocked along with Hotmail, Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, Flickr, Blogger, LiveJournal and Huffington Post.

Print media has not been immune either. In recent days, subscribers to The Economist magazine, the Financial Times and South China Morning Post found Tiananmen-related pages ripped out. And on TV, BBC viewers found the screen turned black on any reference to the event.

Google said access to YouTube in China had been restricted for several weeks now.

China has the world’s most intensive system of Internet censorship including automatic filtering plus active scrutiny by real life “cyber-police.”

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Written by Brian Blum

Brian Blum covers Canada and Israel for Classified Intelligence Report, and contributes to our special reports and research projects. With the AIM Group since 2004, he previously held the real estate and automotive beats. He is the president of Blum Interactive Media, specializing in writing and multimedia content development for online, print, video and audio. His clients include newspapers, universities and non-profits. He moved to Israel from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994 and lives in Jerusalem, where he writes a popular blog about “normal” life in the Holy Land, appropriately titled “This Normal Life.”