Reports are surfacing that Youtube has been blocked in China since Saturday due to videos (like the one below) containing foreign and local footage of political unrest in Tibet.

AFP reported that the access problems were triggered by clips posted by users of violent protests in Lhasa. Domestic feeds of CNN in China have also been blacked out during coverage of the ongoing protests in Tibet. However, unlike before, when the PRC government was requesting self-regulation, the site is now entirely blocked.

Foreign journalists have been asked to vacate the premises. A National Geographic documentary filmmaker who happened to be in Tibet says that he was even escorted to the bathroom by a government official. [Willamette Weekly]

Several bloggers also report that Yahoo! and Google News were also been blocked over the weekend because photos of the Tibet riots posted on their homepage with related news stories.

I ran a search using an IT site that routes addresses through servers in China to check their availability. Yahoo seems to be doing fine, while YouTube is blocked. A friend in China further confirmed that YouTube is indeed offline with only an error message when users attempt to access the site.

The PRC government’s decision to block protest coverage in and out of Tibet has certain similarities with the web blackout that was imposed by the government of Myanmar amid protests last year. Although in that instance, internet access was entirely blocked, which is pretty unlikely to happen in China.

The Chinese government has not issued a statement on this, but neither should come as a big surprise, as Web content containing the Tibetan independent movement as well as teachings from the Dalai Lama have long been on the blacklist. And after all, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reports the riots and foreign press coverage to be a vast international conspiracy.

[P.S. I ran Fresh Cut through through the IT site and congrats! you are not blocked….yet!]