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Just two weeks after blocking most all Google services, China has blocked Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (which had already been sharply restricted) following ethnic violence and civil unrest there.  In the province where 140 people have been killed and 800 injured in clashes between Uighurs and authorities, the government cut mobile phone service and internet access.

While China is known for its insistence on blocking its citizens’ internet access, it’s speculated that this latest move was done to prevent a video like that of Neda Soltan, the young woman who’s violent death at the hands of Iranian security forces was captured on video, spread rapidly across the internet and became a symbol for the opposition.

On Tuesday, Web2Asia’s George Godula wrote:  “As of today 8pm Chinese time Facebook seems not to be accessible from most parts of China Mainland anymore. On the China Telecom connection of our Shanghai office the service vanished at around 7:45pm. Friends in Hong Kong are reporting that they can still access the website.”

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming increasingly popular ways to communicate about critical issues and hot headlines.  When Michael Jackson died traffic on both sites became so heavy both suffered outages and slow load times, and Facebook reported that 6,000 status updates a minute were posted during his funeral on Tuesday.  Twitter has also been so crucial to Iranians during the recent protests there that the State Department requested they cancel their scheduled downtime for maintenance to protect communications in that country. 

As I’ve said before we should all count our blessings that we live in a country where citizens have the freedom to organize, attend and document protests without fear of prosecution and where they alone can decide what to view online.

Read [FastCompany]