China Censors Your Internet: Beijing thinks Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ is code for Tiananmen Square and must be blocked.

Taylor Swift is lucky she didn’t wait till this year to release her hit album “1989.” To her fans, the title refers to her birth year. To Beijing, it’s a veiled reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Unless the U.S. stops it, China has found a way to bar anyone anywhere in the world — including Ms. Swift — from using certain Web addresses it finds politically offensive.In October, Los Angeles-based XYZ.com, which operates several new Internet domains, made a deal with the Chinese government under which it will enforce Beijing’s censorship globally. The registry will let China ban domain names everywhere based on Beijing’s blacklist that includes “freedom,” “liberty” and “democracy,” as well as any reference to the Tiananmen massacre.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-censors-your-internet-1446416123

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