Web site tracks world online censorship reports

    Add new comment

    Date: 
    5 August 2009

    When Shanghai blogger Isaac Mao tried to watch a YouTube clip of Chinese police beating Tibetans, all he got was an error message.

    Mao thought the error — just after the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on Tibetan protesters in China — was too suspicious to be coincidental, so he reported it on a new Harvard-based Web site that tracks online censorship.

    Meanwhile, more than 100 other people in China did the same thing. The spike in reports on Herdict.org in March pointed to government interference rather than a run-of-the-mill technical glitch, even before Google Inc. confirmed China was blocking its YouTube video-sharing site.