Joining the ranks of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and a hundred other websites the rest of the netizens deem essential to daily life, Reddit has now been banned in China. Testing the URL using to Blocked In China shows that the site is unavailable within the country’s provinces and Chinese Firewall Test reports that DNS hasn’t been poisoned, but the URL cannot be loaded.
The block was first spotted by The Independent, however it’s unclear exactly why the site would be blocked. It may be part of the “Golden Shield Project” which is expanding in scope and blocking an increasing amount of sites.
Chinese internet users are accustomed to sites being blocked by the Great Firewall, with many using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to circumvent the block. Reddit joins the list of websites that can only be accessed through VPNs or proxies from within China. Take a look at Blocked In China, and you’ll see that Reddit access appears to have been blocked in all regions of the country — Beijing, Shenzhen, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang Province, and Yunnan Province.
There is a slight irony to Reddit being censored as the site has come under fire for killing certain subreddits and censoring other content. Despite the apparent block, over on the r/China subreddit, there are a number of claims that the site is in fact working. It’s not clear whether this is a matter of a block needing to propagate through the network or not.
Reddit is not the only site which people are having trouble accessing. Over in Russia, the Internet Archive — responsible for the nostalgia-inducing Wayback Machine — is also blocked.
