It has been four days since the protestors have occupied Hongkong's central business district. The Umbrella Revolution testing the resolve of Mainland China's web censors, in filtering out pictures, images and other topics related to the pro-democracy protests.
Unlike in the earlier protests in Tiananmen Square, more than two decades ago, the Hongkong protests have spread online as well. One can visit their Wordpress blog to know about their Manual of Disobedience. Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook are filled with images and videos about the ongoing sit-ins and activities of the demonstrators.
Normally, these kinds of images would have been deleted or filtered out by China's Great Firewall. One important factor that prevents Chinese authorities from censoring such images is that Hongkong, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook are not within the great firewall.
The Chinese censors are instead concentrating their efforts to prevent the Hongkong protests images and other topics related to the Umbrella Revolution from reaching the Chinese inside the great firewall.
The Chinese authorities have managed to block Instagram services and since 2009, Twitter has already been banned in Chinese mainland. In Hongkong, however, Twitter is widely used among all the Chinese in Hongkong. Sina Weibo is a government run substitute to Twitter. Even Sina Weibo reports that numerous posts have been removed since the protests began and most of the topics deleted has something to do with the word or phrase about Umbrella Revolution.
The Hongkong protestors are preparing themselves in case similar web restrictions will be imposed by the China's central authority on them. Firechat is a peer-to-peer text app that saw an increase of over 100,000 new members, presumably from Hongkong. Firechat does not need a central server to relay communications, instead, all messages can be relayed between phones.
The 'Umbrella Revolution' is one protest that Mainland China's censors and Great Firewall will have trouble containing. Only future events will tell how the protests in Hongkong will turn out.
