Despite the numerous criticisms they had been receiving from the international community, including those from the owners and administrators of various websites that they had shut down, the popular “Great Firewall of China” had successful shut down 1.3 million websites in 2010.
At the end of 2010, there was decline of the total number of existing website in China going down to 41% lesser.
The existence of internet blocking technology called as the “Great Firewall of China” was created by a technology firm in the U.S and is designed in order to monitor the content on each site for the benefit of the government and its citizens.
As a communist country, China utilized the Great Firewall of China in order to avoid web content that might threatened peace as well as they monitor and filter web content to minimize web content from sites that is possibly run by activists and anti government that would blow-up criticisms.
The website censorship in China started way back 2009 especially on adult-related sites crackdown.
There might be close monitoring to the content in the web, but China continued to claim and to insist that they still had a “high level of freedom of online speech.”
There might be continued implementation of internet censorship particularly on web pages and it resulted to big decrease on the number of sites, however, as reported, the number of web pages set increase compared from the previous year. An increase of 79% was observed.
In China, some of the world’s popular site that they had blocked includes that of BBC which is in Chinese language. Aside from news services, they had also prevented the presence of social networking sites for their country including the very popular Facebook, the micro-blogging platform Twitter and Youtube itself.
Despite the good intention that the Chinese government is aiming upon implementation of web censorship, pro-civil rights advocates have been expressing their opposition on this policy for they claim that web censorship violates the freedom of speech.