Chinese government has long been known to be notorious for censoring Internet sites they perceive incongruent to their own interest. Famous websites such as YouTube and Wikipedia have been blocked and unblocked several times before in this country, in an attempt to sanitize media content especially the Internet.
According to a recent report, famous BitTorrent websites—those which allow users to download media contents such as music, TV series, and movies—have been blocked due to unknown reasons.
Websites including The Pirate Bay, Mininova, VeryCD and isoHunt, among other BitTorrent sites, have been inaccessible for two day. When people would type in the websites’ addresses, they would be redirected to Baidu which is the most popular search engine site in China (this may be regarded as the Chinese version of Google).
According to the officials of government entity which overlooks media contents, the inaccessibility of the websites is due to some technical problems and was not intended to block or censor the sites.
But contrary to this explanation, experts claimed that technical glitch may prove to be quite impossible given the fact that only BitTorrent websites were affected. In addition to this, pundits believe that technical problems will not cause sites to be redirected to another one.
Meanwhile, an official of Mininova was pleased that Chinese government had lifted the censorship, but still expressed his concern about this incident, adding that he wants to know the real reason behind his sites’ temporary inaccessibility to the general public in this Asian country. (Despite the fact that it was quite impossible since Chinese government have been known to adopt a code of secrecy when it comes to sensitive issues especially media contents.)
To this day, all the BiTorrent sites which had been inaccessible are now available to the public.