Following Facebook’s recent launch of a Chinese-language version for mainland China, users in some parts of Beijing are finding the site’s homepage inaccessible.
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Screen shot of Facebook’s simplified Chinese home page
Technical glitch? Government crackdown? As always with the Web in China, it’s very hard to say. Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. China’s censors don’t discuss which sites they target – or, for that matter, the fact that they block sites at all. And enforcement often varies between regions and even between Internet service providers. Indeed, users in at least some other parts of the country were able to access Facebook Tuesday, even as some in Beijing couldn’t.
Experts say the mystery behind China’s methods are part of the system’s sophistication. While in some countries, users are notified when they are trying to access blocked content, Web surfers in China get connection “timeout” or “reset” messages, which might seem like a common computer error. In addition, sites aren’t always entirely blocked; for example, Facebook’s homepage was blocked for some yesterday, but users could access other parts of its site if they logged in through other URLs. English-language Wikipedia, once widely blocked, is more accessible these days, but repeated clicks on a link to Wikipedia page about a taboo subject matter will cause a browser to be locked out of the entire site for several minutes or longer (Chinese Wikipedia reportedly can only be accessed through secure connections) . Yahoo’s photo-sharing site Flickr is mostly accessible, but users in China have to add complimentary software to their browser to make sure they can access all their photos. Tech-savvy users can also access blocked sites through proxies and other methods.
Though mysterious and highly irritating to English speaking Internet users in China, the blocking of popular foreign Web sites in China affects only a fraction of China’s huge Internet user population, most of whom use local sites (of course, those sites must often censor themselves). Facebook doesn’t have a large following in China. It claims about 285,000 members in its “China” network, while China has at least 225 million Internet users by some estimates. In comparison, the Facebook network for New York City had 997,000 members as of Tuesday afternoon. Still, the Facebook China population was growing pretty quickly – it added about 3,000 members in the last week. (Facebook competes with MySpace, a unit of NewsCorp, parent company of Journal publisher Dow Jones).
Beijing’s Olympic organizers have said that the Internet will be uncensored during the Olympics, a dubious claim. If Facebook still is running into interference in Beijing come August, organizers can be fairly certain that at least some of the half million foreign visitors expected here this August will notice.
UPDATE: In an emailed response after this post went up, a Facebook spokeswoman said: “We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in China are having difficulty getting access to Facebook. We have not made any changes to our site that would create access problems and are looking into the situation.” The spokeswoman also gave first dates we’ve seen for the launch of the simplified-Chinese version of Facebook, saying it launched on June 18 and 19, along with traditional-Chinese and Russian versions, as part of an ongoing effort to make the site more international. Facebook introduced Spanish as the first foreign-language version in February, and now includes more than 15 languages.
–Loretta Chao
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