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Censorship of protest videos from Tibet

Video sharing site YouTube became unavailable in China as authorities cracked down on protests in neighboring Tibet.

Only a few days after the US State Department took China off the annual Human Rights Report list of the worst violators, which happened as a hundred Tibetan monks were being placed under arrest by Chinese authorities, China opted to block YouTube within the country.

Videos like this one from Lhasa show the protests and violence happening as Tibetans responded to the crackdown. Monks had taken to the streets to march in memory of the failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

A report on Yahoo News said China began blocking YouTube on Sunday, in an apparent effort to stem the interest in videos of the protests. Attempts to reach YouTube retrieved a "page unavailable" message instead.

Though Internet companies like YouTube's owner Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft, may be able to point to the State Department report as proof of China's improvements and broadening Internet freedom, it's going to be difficult to gloss over this latest bit of censorship, not to mention the events leading to it.