Page 193 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 6. The Xiamen PX plant event

Xiamen to broadcast about the protests in real time, including two Guangzhou-based

bloggers, ‘Beifeng’ (a media expert) and ‘37’ (John Kennedy, a young American in-
terested in China), who sent text messages to their colleagues to post online. Kennedy
posted his blog on Global Voices on 1 June 2007. It recorded text updates, pictures and
videos of the demonstration in Xiamen.

6.4.4.2 Flickr.com

Flickr is an image and video hosting service and a popular website for users to
share and embed personal photographs and build an online community. It is widely
used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and

social media.
During the collective stroll, many participants posted images on Flickr to avoid
censorship and the pictures can still be found on Flickr today. The Chinese government
cannot restrain Flickr as the same as it regulated the domestic sites, and the usual cen-

soring approach of deleting sensitive information cannot be fulfilled. From June 2007,
the government has intermittently blocked Flickr and on 7 June 2007, users in mainland
China could not see any pictures when accessing the site. Flickr technicians conducted
a series of tests and found that there was nothing wrong from the technical side, it was

because of Chinese government’s block. The Great Firewall filtered pictures under the
domain name: farm1.static.flickr.com and farm2.static.flickr.com (Kennedy, 2007). The
Chinese government did not explain the reasons for the block, many citizens indicated
that it was ‘unacceptable’ and ‘dissatisfying’ to them.

From June 2007 to July 2008, users in mainland China can access Flickr if they
install an add-in in Firefox browser called ‘Access Flickr’, which allows them to load
all the pictures. On 31 July 2008, with the opening of Beijing Olympic Games, Flickr
was reopened to users in mainland China and all the pictures could be accessed nor-

mally. On 3 July 2009, Flickr was blocked again under the domain name farm4.static.
flickr.com. In July 2014, Flickr was blocked completely in China. Figure 34 shows that
Filckr is blocked when using a Chinese IP address.

177
177