Yahoo’s gotten bashed, again and again, over the way in which it’s cooperated with the Chinese government. Apparently it didn’t cooperate as much as the government would have liked, however – images on Yahoo’s Flickr site are now being blocked.
The block actually seems to have been in place, off and on, for the better part of a week, but censorship is one of those things that are inherently hard to hear about. For a while, even Yahoo didn’t seem sure of what was going on.
“It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end,” a spokeswoman told Reuters. “It appears that the Chinese government is restricting access to Flickr, although we have not received confirmation from them. We are currently investigating this issue and hope that it is only a temporary one.”
This is all happening even as Yahoo appears to be rethinking its compliance with Chinese censorship; the company recently stated that it “is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet.”
Of course, that’s not exactly an apology, and it’s definitely not a measurable action. In regards to the Flickr problem, it also remains to be seen if Yahoo will say or do anything of importance. Yet some users have beaten the company to the punch – on the Sinosplice blog, a Firefox add-on that works around the Flickr block has been posted.
