Censorship, Social Networking | featured news

China blocks access to the term "Shanghai Composite Index" on some of the country's most popular microblogging sites.

Twitter on Thursday announced that it is now able to block tweets that run afoul of certain countries' restrictions on speech, but that has prompted backlash from users who fear the micro-blogging service will honor takedown requests from repressive regimes.

Users in China are reporting that access to LinkedIn has been blocked throughout the country.

A Pakistani court on Monday lifted a ban on social networking website Facebook which had carried a competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad, but access to any "blasphemous" material will remain blocked, officials said.

Pakistan has blocked the popular video sharing website YouTube indefinitely in a bid to contain "blasphemous" material, officials said on Thursday.

We've seen some major world events unfold on the social media stage in the past week, the biggest being Google's threat to pull out of China and the Haiti earthquake.

Barack Obama spoke to a group of Chinese students tonight at a town hall in Shanghai. The meeting was streamed live, worldwide on the Whitehouse website and on the Whitehouse's Facebook page. He was asked a limited number of questions by the audience and one was about Twitter, which has been blocked in China since July.

With traditional reporting silenced and with e-mail and Web services shut down, much of the information about the election protests in Iran was coming through social media sites.

Chinese censors blocked access to Twitter and other popular online services on Tuesday afternoon, two days before the twentieth anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests in Tiananmen Square which cost hundreds of lives.