"We manage the Internet according to law ... to prevent the spread of harmful information." -China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang
China has just blocked this popular video sharing site and did not offer a reason to justify the ban.
Google, which owns YouTube, said it began noticing a decline in traffic from China about noon Monday.
By early Wednesday, site users insider China continued to encounter an error message: "Network Timeout. The server at youtube.com is taking too long to respond."
-CNN Article
but this isn't the first time this nation has blocked youtube, with the other time being last year (march '08) during riots in chinese-controlled Tibet.
Many in the country speculated the latest ban may be an attempt to filter access to footage that a Tibetan exile group released. The videos show Tibetans being kicked and beaten, allegedly by Chinese police officers after the riots.
China, with 298 million Internet users, has routinely blocked access to Web sites it considers politically unacceptable, including the Voice of America and The New York Times. The Chinese government has also censored television broadcasts, including those by the BBC and CNN, during coverage of issues such as its policy in Tibet and Taiwan.
-CNN Article
Personally, I think this censorship of information from so many people is abhorable.
In my opinion, if the chinese government was proud of what it was doing, than they wouldn't need these censors. I think they are only worsening their own image on a global scale in a futile attempt to hide information internally.
