China's Twitter-like website Weibo.com has been blocked from showing any results for the phrase 'the truth'.
According to The Daily Mail, attempts to search the phrase were blocked on the site, which is used by almost 300 million users.
Users noticed that if they typed in the Chinese characters for 'the truth', they received a message refusing to display any results.
It is not known how long the phrase search was blocked and if China's controlling Communist government had intervened.
A spokesman for the website insisted that the block was due to a 'technical glitch'.
However, the one-party state is notorious for actively blocking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, with the so-called Great Firewall of China.
At the same time that 'the truth' was inaccessible, the Weibo account of the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai was also inaccessible.
A search for the account said results could not be displayed and "relevant sensitive information or garbage content has been filtered".
"Weibo is the most popular social media site in China and as a result suffers the highest level of censorship," Qi Zhenyu, head of social media for iSun Affairs, a Hong Kong-based current affairs online magazine that is banned in China, said of Weibo
"Whenever there is a word that upsets them, they just go ahead and block [but] most of the time you can't really explain why they censor a certain word," Qi added.
It is possible that Beijing's sensitivity to Internet freedom may have increased in recent days after news that the Chinese economy is growing at its slowest rate since the global recession began in 2008.
They fear that the clamour for democracy could grow if people cannot see concrete economic benefits to strict control by a single political party. (ANI)
Source: http://www.macaunews.net/index.php?sid/207448691/scat/8d8fbf819e12707b
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