Photo sharing site, Pinterest, has joined the list of banned sites in mainland China. The list consists of Facebook, Youtube, Google, Yahoo and even Twitter.
This block was reported by censorship monitoring company, Greatfire. Greatfire regularly monitors a range of the internet’s top websites for accessibility in China. According to the company, Pinterest.com has not bee available in China for a couple of days.
Techcrunch asks a salient question; why would a site that is famed for sharing images of animals, wedding dresses, recipes and other photos be targeted by the Chinese government and deemed unfit for purpose in the country?
CNN reports that the timing coincided with China’s annual National People’s Congress, a sensitive time in Beijing when China’s top leadership and thousands of delegates gather to set the country’s political and economic course for the year
However it also questions whether the ban is actually about politics or protectionism as the site is is not known for any political content.
Cho-Wen Chu, a professor at Taiwan’s Chinese Culture University says that China’s censorship has effectively “become a tool of industrial policy to discriminate against foreign competitors.”
A crackdown on Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook helped domestic companies such as Baidu, Youku, Weibo and Renren flourish.
Pinterest, the company, has not made any official statement on this issue.
