From The World, from Public Radio International
How China has censored words relating to the Tiananmen Square anniversary
By Kuang Keng Kuek Ser
The beginning of every June is one of the busiest times for Chinese censors. That's when the world — except China — commemorates the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
Internet censorship is tightened during this time of each year not only to prohibit discussion of the brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy protest that happened 27 years ago, but to erase the incident from Chinese history, especially among younger generations....
Several organizations have been monitoring the censorship on Weibo, the leading Chinese microblogging platform with over 600 million users. One of them is China Digital Times, a news website founded by Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. When a word or phrase is blocked on Weibo, users who search for it get only a message that reads, “According to the relevant laws and regulations, search results for [this phrase] cannot be displayed.”...