MCLC: wall comes down briefly for Facebook users

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: anne henochowicz (dannemh at alumni.upenn.edu)
Subject: wall comes down briefly for Facebook users
***********************************************************

Source: South China Morning Post (4/25/12):
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a
0a0/?vgnextoid=187b038a245e6310VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=China&s=News

Wall comes down briefly for Facebook users
By Keith Zhai
 

Some mainland internet users were able to gain access to Facebook, the
world's largest online social network, for more than seven hours
yesterday.Having been blocked by the authorities for nearly three years,
internet users in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and some cities in central
China said they were able to visit the site from early morning to
mid-afternoon, some through mobile internet connections.

It has since been blocked again.

"Is the wall down?" one microblogger asked on weibo, the mainland
equivalent of Twitter, referring to the extensive online filtering system
dubbed the "great firewall of China" (GFW) which the government uses to
monitor and censor online information.

"This could be caused by an update to the GFW or an error in processing,"
said Hong Bo, a Beijing-based IT commentator. "There's a chance that some
websites could have been released for a short time when the system was
updating."

Facebook was not accessible everywhere, however, with internet users in
Sichuan, Guangxi and Xinjiang reporting that it was still blocked
yesterday.

A woman in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's media
office said the issue was "too technical" for her to comment on.

Facebook, which has more than 845 million active users worldwide, was
blocked on the mainland after rioting in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang,
in July 2009.

The central government believed that Uygur activists were using the site
to post details of their protests.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released a report later saying that
Facebook "was used by a foreign intelligence agency to overthrow the
governments of other countries".

Facebook opened a sales office in Hong Kong early last year, giving the
company its second office in Asia after Singapore. The office is
strategically located to serve the Hong Kong and Taiwanese markets, and
potentially mainland China.

The mainland's 500 million internet users are the largest untapped market
for American social networking sites.
Facebook has plans for a US$100 billion initial public offering, possibly
in the middle of next month.