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​Don’t Worry, You Can Still Reddit in China

The internet’s systematically most democratic website sits untouched by the Great Firewall.

Earlier today the Independent and The Next Web reported that Reddit, the link-based social network and "front page of the internet," was blocked in China, based on a report from the site Blocked In China. Unfortunately, that doesn't pass when it's run through other Chinese DNS checkers. GreatFire reports a 3 percent block rate within the last 90 days.

Charlie Smith, co-founder of GreatFire, told me that Blocked In China also erroneously reports Weibo, a massively popular Chinese social network and Baidu, China's Google, as blocked.

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Interestingly, Blocked In China draws information from View DNS, another DNS checker site that says Reddit is up. Greatfirewallofchina.org, a site similar to Blocked In China, says the site is down too. This might just be a case of third-party sites reporting incorrect information from the parent site.

It's interesting that China hasn't blocked Reddit after all this time—the site has been touted as a haven for free speech over its history. Even though that's come under fire recently, the site gives a platform for plenty of sexually explicit content and political dissent.

A Harvard study on websites blocked in China found the usual characteristics of sites blocked by the Great Firewall: sites that foment political dissidence or democracy, global news, education and religion… All of which are fairly denominated on Reddit.

But here's another possibility: China might not block based on content alone. Maybe the site hasn't attracted enough visitors from the mainland to pose enough of a threat. Reddit is mostly in English—even China-related sections are in English—and the interface might be too alienating to the average Chinese user to really hold an audience.

Whatever the case, go ahead and keep perusing gonewild and atheism, Chinese netizens. The government's probably not too concerned.