HispanicBusiness

Parting with Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail is such tweet sorrow.

In what's been called the "Great Firewall of China," Beijing has blocked nearly a dozen Western Internet sites and search engines in advance of the 20th anniversary Thursday of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Chinese users' access to the popular social networking service Twitter was barred across mainland China today. Other sites reportedly blocked include Hotmail, Flickr, Blogger, Livejournal, Tumblr, the Huffington Post, Microsoft's MSN Space blog tool, and its new search engine Bing. YouTube was blocked in March after Tibetan activists posted video clips, according to London's Guardian newspaper.

On June 4, 1989, tanks entered Tiananmen Square in Beijing to halt weeks-long protests by students and workers. China called the protests a "counter-revolutionary" action and never issued an official death toll. Events to mark the anniversary are illegal in China, but crowds have gathered annually in Hong Kong for a vigil. Reuters reported that this year there were calls on the Internet for a re-evaluation of the protests, and that may have led to the blackout.

The Times of London said that the nature of Twitter has allowed Chinese users to write terms that would be blocked on Web sites, such as "6/4" to refer to the date of the massacre.

Blogger Michael Anti told another Chinese blog last week, according to the Times: "I want to point out that the Chinese Twitterland is funnier than the English one, for a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language."

Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, but in Chinese one or two characters can make up an entire word.

"This is so frustrating. Now I feel China is exactly the same as Iran," wrote a Shanghai financial professional, according to Reuters.

Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace were not affected by the blackout.