WashPost: China Expands Its 'Great Firewall' Over Tiananmen

A few of the last bastions of western media have been added to China's "great firewall," as The Washington Post and The Guardian have been added to the websites blocked in the country, the Post reported.

The censorship of the Post and Guardian comes amid the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989, in which protesters calling for Democracy in China where beating down by the government.

Internet users in China, without the use of a virtual private network (VPN), would not be able to access the following services and websites, according to the Post:

• WeChat.
• All English versions of Wikipedia.
• CNN.com.
• Bloomberg.
• The New York Times.
• Reuters.
• The Wall Street Journal.
• Facebook.
• Twitter.
• Google-owned services, including YouTube.
• Dropbox.
• Slack.
• WhatsApp.
• Instagram.
• Reddit.

That list is just a mere sample of 10,000 Web domains blocked in China by artificial intelligence algorithms, which can also hunt down VPN workarounds. Wikipedia lists websites blocked by China, and TravelChinaCheaper professes to have a complete index of the sites censored updated on the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

The Internet censors in China rarely give reason or a timetable for the blockages and outages, but since 2013 "more and more foreign websites being irrevocably added to China's blacklist," as the country seeks "Internet sovereignty," potentially giving dictatorships a roadmap of government censorship, according to the Post.

GreatFire.org is a company that "monitors and challenges Internet censorship in China" and has offered mirror websites of those above to allow users in China to access the information inside the "great firewall" without the use of VPNs, the company claims.

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