Twenty years ago students gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square for a peaceful protest. When the protest ended broken bodies littered the square. China is now in the process of shutting down social network sites before the anniversary.
Users of the social networking tool
Twitter have found that the application has been blocked on Tuesday afternoon. Other social networking sites are also being blocked for citizens including Flickr and Hotmail.
Late Tuesday afternoon Twitter began posting messages about loading problems in China. Twitter has let Chinese users know of applications that should be able to post to the site without having to visit the website.
Chinese Internet use is heavily monitored. The urban elite in China have flocked to Twitter in recent months enjoying more freedoms than government regulated sites offer.
The Guardian reports:
"Twitter is a tool which can put all the sensitive things and sensitive guys together, very quickly. That's the very thing that the Chinese government doesn't want to see in China," said blogger Michael Anti, who had predicted that Twitter would not be allowed for long. "They needed time to figure out what it is and whether it needed to be controlled."
YouTube has already been blocked since March after footage of the conflict in Tibet appeared.
Bloggers predicted that the government would be blocking the Internet sites last week.
China , a Communist country, has been monitoring Internet activity concerning the anniversary according to reports. They are hoping to prevent public protests.
On June 4, 1989 the Chinese government ordered the People's Liberation Army to turn on the protesting students and citizens at Tiananmen Square. There is no true report of how many were slain by the government's tanks and guns. Estimates have set the number of dead between 800 and 1,000. The protesters had been demanding democracy and more freedom.
