It’s incredible how history repeats itself – down the ages it’s happened – people write, publish ideas, speak their mind and well simply think. But when these ideas don’t fit in with the current political ideology they happen to be in ….. there’s always a solution. Here’s how the Nazis followed a time honoured tradition of dealing with ideas they didn’t like – book burning, even the phrase sounds backward.

You could argue the electronic equivalent is censoring your internet access of course. One of the latest sites to get into the bad books of censorship mad countries and regimes across the world is facebook. Seems quite crazy when you think about it but there’s nearly always a common theme in countries that like to block free speech and then suddenly you get facebook blocked and lots of other sites follow the trend. Web sites usually get blocked because of the fact that it mostly allows free speech and people to communicate. Many countries don’t like free speech, whether on religious, political or some other grounds – people can talk in Facebook and that’s obviously bad news in some places.

These same countries, are now worried about other sites too – including many where it’s prudent to use proxies for Instagram in order to stay hidden from the authorities.

For instance Facebook was banned in Syria using the following excuse –

Lebanon’s daily As-Safir mentioned that the reason would be to prevent Israelis infiltration in Syria-based groups

It really makes Facebook sound rather sinister, makes me imagine a team of Mossad agents in an emergency meeting, their Syrian infiltration plans in tatters because their highly trained double agents erm…………….. can’t log into Facebook !

Also available on YouTube under – Bypass a Facebook Block

Facebook banned or blocked?

If you get an unusual site not found, a 404 or a telling off page when you try and access sites like facebook chances are it’s been deemed naughty by whatever country you happen to be surfing. Well there’s hope for everyone – the techies of the internet are fighting back with lots of ways of bypassing these restrictions. The software I use has proxies in countries across the world, so I pick the country I want to surf from 🙂

Anyway here’s a tip for anyone having trouble getting those Facebook banned blues, if you have a problem with facebook blocked then try using the free demo mode of Identity Cloaker.

It’s actually fully functional but only allows access to a few sites and facebook is one of them – just click on the graphic here and download the demo. It should allow you to access facebook wherever it’s been blocked although you should be aware of company or school policies before using it to access facebook in those environments.

It’s rather sad that even in the electronic world that there are still huge inequalities in how people access the internet. It’s quite depressing to find even on the internet we aren’t all equal, if you have the misfortune to be brought up in a certain country then the people in power will control what you see.

My experience of facebook is rather trivial and facile to be honest, but it is a medium to express, to share and link up with people so can’t be too much wrong with that ! They are called social networking sites for a reason, it’s hard to trust any government that wants facebook blocked in my opinion.