In yet another display of censorship, China has announced it will begin scanning all text messages. The messages will automatically be scanned for keywords provided by the police. Any messages flagged and found to contain the keywords will be deemed “unhealthy” and the government has ordered cell providers to cut off service to the senders. more »

Just two weeks after blocking most all Google services, China has blocked Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (which had already been sharply restricted) following ethnic violence and civil unrest there. In the province where 140 people have been killed and 800 injured in clashes between Uighurs and authorities, the government cut mobile phone service and internet more »

China’s dispute with Google has reached a new level as millions of users found they were unable to access the English or Chinese versions search engine or Gmail. The block was put in place after the government accused Google of willfully spreading pornography. “We have found that the English version of Google.com has spread lots more »

China has threatened Google with unspecified punishment if it does not remove all pornographic results from the Chinese version of its search engine. The government had already disabled the Google Suggests feature, which makes search suggestions based on keywords, because it says the feature was returning mostly pornographic results. China has also allegedly disabled the more »

China has announced that it will demand that all new PCs sold in that country come with web filtering software included. The government said it is necessary to control pornography on the web and protect its citizens from “unhealthy” information on the Internet. Manufacturers will have to pre-install the blocking software or include it on more »

China has begun blocking all access to YouTube, adding it to a the long list of sites it blocks. Other sites on that list include the Amazon, Flickr, GoDaddy, Google News, iTunes, and Wikipedia. While this latest block has been confirmed, Chinese officials have not offered any explanation for it. When asked if China fears the Internet, this is how a Chinese Foreign Ministry responded, “Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite,” the official, Qin Gang, explains. “China’s Internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security.”