SHANGHAI - INDEPENDENT information about deadly riots in China's remote northwest filtered out on Twitter, YouTube and other Internet forums on Monday, frustrating government efforts to control the news.
The communist authorities who built the so-called Great Firewall of China raced to stamp out video, images and words posted by Internet users about the unrest on Sunday which, officials said, left at least 140 people dead.
Twitter and YouTube appeared to be blocked in China late on Monday afternoon, while leading Chinese search engines would not give results for 'Urumqi", the city in Xinjiang where the riots occurred.
Traditional press also carried only the official version of events, which blamed the unrest on ethnic Muslim Uighurs.
But similar to the phenomenon seen last month during Iran's political turmoil, pictures, videos and updates from Urumqi poured onto social networking and image sharing websites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
In many cases, items were reposted by other Internet users on sites outside China to preserve the content, while Twitter helped link people around the globe to images Chinese authorities did not want seen.
A US academic in Urumqi appeared to break news about the unrest via Twitter, saying hours before the mainstream news organisations on Sunday night that security forces were blocking off streets in the city.
State-run China Central Television showed its first images of the violence just before midday on Monday - more than 12 hours after footage began circulating on the Internet.
But its footage gave a different impression to some of the clips on YouTube that Uighur exile groups said backed their case the protesters were largely peaceful.
Meanwhile some Chinese Internet users were able to express frustration at having their postings on the violence deleted. In one case, Chinese blogger Wen Ni'er reposted an entry on a Google site. -- AFP
