As CDT reported two weeks ago, Chinese netizens have taken over a website dedicated to commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall in order to blast Internet censorship in their country. Today, on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, Vancouver Sun and other English media are covering the story:
Chinese netizens are marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a little anarchy of their own.
They are flying over the Great Firewall of China (GFW) in exuberant numbers to send messages to an anniversary website in Berlin that was set up to allow people to share memories of the night the wall came down, or, recommend “which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.”
The opportunity to use the forum to chip away at Beijing’s heavy Internet censorship was obviously too good a chance for many Chinese netizens to ignore and they deluged the site with calls for web freedom. Until the Chinese government caught wind, that is.
On the evening of Nov. 2, 13 days after its launch, the Berlin Twitter Wall became inaccessible in China. At that point, according to organizers, 1,500 of the 3,300 tweets posted had been written in Chinese.
See also from MSNBC’s blog, “In China, battles over a new wall.”
