DUBAI: The Chinese government has banned coverage of the ongoing events in Egypt on social media websites in the country. The move to bar the word “Egypt” from being used on Twitter-like sites has been widely condemned by the online community and is another sign of the importance of what is going on in Egypt, activists told Bikya Masr. “We are being forced not to watch as an entire country's people show their government that enough is enough,” one Chinese online dissident told Bikya Masr. “It's no surprise because we here in China also live under dictatorship and a lack of freedoms.” Chinese services run by Sina, Tencent and Sohu blocked the word “Egypt” from being used in messages passed around by users. A search for “Egypt” on Sina brings up a message saying, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown.” The services have hundreds of millions of users. “Clearly, the Communist rulers don't want China's own youths to get any ideas about staging a popular revolt. China already had a huge problem with that when it quelled the Tiananmen Square protests,” wrote Dean Takahashi for VentureBeat. “If microblogging had been around in those days, as well as text messages, maybe things might have turned out differently, as they did in Tunisia.” BM
