Internet Maintenance Day: Celebrate Beijing-Style

by Truemorist | June 4, 2009 at 09:17 am

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Happy Internet Maintenance Day! As Beijing continues to pretend that the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened, it's forcing Chinese web users to play along by shutting down social media sites and blogs that so much as utter the word "democracy".

Other sites, which have been pressured to censor their own content, have opted to take themselves offline in protest, calling it Internet Maintenance Day. The term itself is inherently silly: "The Internet is broken... but we can fix it!" Here's an openly-viewable Google doc of which sites are apparently "participating". There are hundreds.

According to some twitter reports, some websites decided to take a few days off because of the pressure from propaganda department. Website administrators were asked to tighten their self-censorship, if any post carry key term such as “democracy” tomorrow, the websites would be forced to close down. (via williamlong) Some websites and personal blogs decided to shut down for a day for commemorating June 4th.

Not sure how many Western sites are following suit, if any.

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