Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011 and reports Gmail access problems in China during the Arab Spring uprisings as news of the day. Google’s relationship with China and the services blocked there have changed a great deal since.
China and Google aren’t getting along at all, or rather, let’s say China isn’t in favour of freedom of social communication, so it keeps censoring access to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and so on.
The latest problem Google is facing involves its email service, Gmail, whose users have been having trouble accessing it ever since the uprisings for democracy began across the Middle East. After analysing the problems Gmail is having in China, Google issued a statement explaining that the service is working fine, and that what is really happening is that the Chinese government is behind those technical problems, trying to make the population believe that Google is to blame.
Google also complains about attempted attacks by Chinese hackers, which, according to what it told ABC, come from activists who work for Human Rights in China.
Meanwhile, Google has announced that it will stop cooperating with the Chinese government in censoring banned sites in its search results.
Featured image: Noah Unsworth, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
