China accused of blocking Flickr

 

Gallery

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 12 Jun 2007 at 16:29

China appears to be blocking the popular photo sharing website Flickr, its owner Yahoo! said today.

Yahoo!'s Hong Kong office reported that it has not served any images to mainland China since last week and confirmed that this was not down to a technical problem. It believes the Chinese authorities took action after photos of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the site.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo Hong Kong said that the company had not had any notification from China, whose Ministry of Information could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the US capital Washington later suggested that the authorities were trying to protect children from 'racy' images.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield said that the problem was being regularly monitored.

'We hope that this is a temporary issue, and we currently believe that it will be,' he said. 'In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives.'