China's Great Firewall has long held a policy for blocking Western-based social networking sites. The country does this in order to control the flow of information, and to also benefit its own homemade services such as Weibo, Meipai and others.
Among the few that was left, was Pinterest. The photo-sharing platform has avoided the Great Firewall ban, until China finally decided to block it as well.
As a result, more than 721 million internet users in China are unable to visit or use Pinterest.
The news came from censorship monitoring organization GreatFire that checks a range of the internet's top websites for accessibility in China on a regular basis. Its system saw that Pinterest.com has been unavailable in China for the past week
The Great Firewall is China's internet censorship system. While it's prone to glitches and temporary blocks, Pinterest that has been inaccessible from China for a week suggests that it has been deliberately censored.
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Pinterest itself isn't a mainstream service in the country, not to a degree like more popular social media such as Facebook and Twitter, for example.
While it isn't clear why Pinterest is also blocked in China, It is thought that the ban is because there are already several local clones available in the country. The timing however also coincides with meetings between the country's top legislative and consultative bodies, the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, often referred to as Two Sessions.
In preparation for Two Sessions, China has declared all virtual private networks (VPNs) to be illegal, unless they're authorized by the government. VPNs have long been used by users in China to bypass ISP internet restrictions by hiding their true location.
