China Club forum Question: Why did China ban Facebook?

Posted by Piggerman I really do not understand why you worry that Facebook is blocked, China has QQ.com which is basically the same thing, post pictures, make friends, play games, leave comments. Youtube is another one which is blocked, this is ok also because China has Youku.com which has even more videos and a lot of the same videos as Youtube.

Posted by Profi I think the reason might be the amount of money that rolls through these websites through advertising. Facebook is worth billions of dollars. This money might want to be kept in country, If it rolls through google or facebook all that money is going back to America.

Posted by Eagle89 Banning Facebook is silly. So many Asian countries/places use Facebook like Sinagpore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Hong Kong. And look their economy ain't destroyed by Facebook. In fact it makes them more connected to the world. Chinese people in these countries can contact all their old college buds/ex work colleagues in Canada, Austrilia, UK and US. And funny enough a lot Chinese people in these countries have no idea about QQ and renren. Or they do know but won't bother with it.

Posted by Uberche The sites were banned for two reasons 1 - They didn't allow the Chinese government to control what was allowed and 2 - The Chinese are unable to compete on a level playing field so they just stole the technology from the Western companies and then banned them. Facebook became Renren, Twitter became Sina Microblogs, Youtube became Youku, Google became Baidu. The lie that it was because of the protests was a joke, MSN could be used to organize protests just as easily but it wasn't banned. So could all kinds of other services that weren't banned. You grow popular in China in the communication industry and you don't allow the Chinese government to censor and control what is seen, you will be banned. If you threaten a Chinese company for control of the Chinese market, especially in the communication industry, you will be banned. Such is business in China.

Posted by Stewart11 Facebook has been censored by the Chinese government in reaction to the Xinjiang riots. The Chinese government run the internet through a National firewall or filter this prevents almost any Chinese computer within China to access websites they deem unacceptable.