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China blocks Pinterest

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DQW Bureau
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China blocks Pinterest

Image-curation website Pinterest has become the latest social media service blocked in China, checks on censorship monitoring websites indicated recently.

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According to greatfire.org and blockedinchina.net, the popular virtual bulletin board service has been unavailable in mainland China since last Thursday.

The San Francisco-headquartered service joins rival photo-sharing firm Instagram -- which has a much larger user base -- as well as Twitter and Facebook on the list of social media platforms inaccessible in mainland China.

The ruling Communist party restricts access to many foreign websites including Google, with a vast network of controls dubbed the Great Firewall of China.

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While China user numbers are not available, Pinterest is a hit particularly among women, who tend to pin images about non-political subjects such as food, fashion and travel.

However, some Pinterest users maintain public boards on subjects that are deemed politically sensitive in China -- such as human rights issues.

There is a Pinterest board devoted to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, for example, and another on the Senkakus, an archipelago controlled by Japan, which China claims as the Diaoyus.

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“It will be very hard to do my homework later because I had collected the works of a designer there,” a student wrote on Weibo, China’s native version of Twitter.

Another Weibo user, who described herself as an e-commerce designer, wrote that Pinterest was a key tool in her job and it will be “hard to work effectively without it”.

A 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that China had the most restrictive Internet policies of 65 countries it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria.

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China is home to the world’s largest number of internet users -- 731 million as of December -- the government-linked China Internet Network Information Center said in January.

 

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