Skip to main content

Medium is the latest casualty of the Great Firewall of China

medium job cuts
Despite pursuing an aggressive expansion strategy, blogging platform Medium just took a hit overseas.

The service is now reportedly blocked in China, where a powerful firewall has already censored the likes of Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and Google’s Blogger.

Although those platforms have been banned in the country for a few years now, Medium had managed to fly under the radar. Until now, that is.

Earlier this week, China also ramped up its restrictions on Western news outlets following the Panama Papers leak, which implicated several Chinese officials. The tightening of Web security saw major publishers, including Time and The Economist, targeted due to their alleged criticism of President Xi Jinping in respective articles. Medium recently stated that over a dozen new media companies had begun using its platform after it expanded its CMS tools and advertising opportunities. It is thought that China may have banned Medium as it was viewed as an avenue through which news providers could dodge censorship to reach Chinese web users, reports ABC.

Having been alerted to the block by a post on the Hacker News forum, Tech in Asia ran a ping test on Medium’s homepage to discover that the site could not be reached, and is inaccessible on all three Chinese telcos. An additional test on Greatfire.org, a site that documents Web censorship in the country, shows that Medium was first blocked on April 10.

Founded by former Twitter CEO Evan Williams, Medium was launched in August 2012 as “a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters.” It has since attracted a number of publishers and bloggers through its collaborative, text-oriented layout, which allows users to create and annotate articles. Medium has yet to comment on the ban.

Editors' Recommendations

Saqib Shah
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Saqib Shah is a Twitter addict and film fan with an obsessive interest in pop culture trends. In his spare time he can be…
WeChat’s censorship system extends beyond China’s borders, finds new study
apple tencent wechat tip deal

WeChat is muting certain keywords and websites for its domestic users even if they re-register with an overseas phone number, claims a new study by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.

The popular messaging platform is owned and operated by Chinese internet giant Tencent, and now boasts 846 million users, making it the fourth largest app of its kind in the world. WeChat’s services are no longer limited to messaging and voice and video calls, it also offers games, mobile payments, and bots. The platform’s model is the envy of Western messaging services, in particular Facebook Messenger -- which itself has pushed through a number of updates to bring it closer to WeChat.

Read more
China’s fake wall of social media posts is driving its citizens to distraction
china fake social media posts study cyber security 3

A new study has revealed the lengths China’s government is going to in order to distract its web-savvy citizens from their public officials' bad publicity.

The groundbreaking report reveals that the state’s internet propaganda machine (known as the Fifty Cent Party, in reference to the amount per post its workers are paid) churns out a staggering 488 million fake social media posts a year.

Read more
Kazakhstan mandates Internet backdoor, modeled after China’s Great Firewall
bangladeshi bank heist foiled by spelling mistake internet hacking dark net

When it comes to Internet freedoms (or the lack thereof), taking cues from China rarely bodes well for a citizenry. And now, the people of Kazakhstan are experiencing this realization firsthand as lawmakers move to force Internet users across the country to install a sort of backdoor system. This would allow the Kazakh government to monitor all web traffic on both desktop and mobile devices, and closely resembles China's so-called Great Firewall.

Under the new law, all citizens must install a “national security certificate” on all Internet-connected devices, which will "intercept requests to and from foreign websites." This is effectively the low-cost version of China's monitoring strategy, which involves a much more complicated (and expensive) digital infrastructure that filters traffic itself. Beginning January 1, officials will not only be able to see Internet users' content, but also block this data entirely.

Read more