A Hong Kong internet service provider on Thursday said it had blocked access to a pro-democracy website to comply with national national security legislation.
In a statement sent by e-mail on Thursday, Hong Kong Broadband Network said it had access to HKChronicles, a website that compiled information on ‘yellow’ stores supporting the city’s democracy movement, and personal information and photos of announced the police and pro-Beijing. supporters during protests against the government in 2019.
“We have disabled access to the Website in accordance with the requirement issued under National Security Law,” the company said.
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The site’s editor-in-chief, Naomi Chan, said in a report last week that users in Hong Kong reported the site as inaccessible. She accuses telecommunications companies such as SmarTone, China Mobile Hong Kong, PCCW and Hong Kong Broadband Network of blocking it.
China Mobile Hong Kong and SmarTone did not immediately comment. A PCCW spokesman said he had no comment on that.
Chan advised Hong Kongers to ‘make earlier preparations to counter future internet blockades on a larger scale and face the darkness before dawn.
The move to block HKChronicles has raised concerns that Beijing is gaining more control over the city and breaking its promise to allow the former British colony to maintain separate civil rights and political systems for 50 years after the communist ruling continent took over in 1997.
It has also increased fears of internet restrictions in Hong Kong such as the ‘Great Firewall of China’, a system of internet censorship on the mainland that blocks foreign search engines and social media platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter and scrubs the internet of keywords. considered sensitive by the Chinese government.
Glacier Kwong, a digital rights and political activist based in Germany, wrote in a Twitter post last week that Hong Kong had abused ‘legal procedures and other means’ to free the flow of information online over the past 18 months obstruct’.
“The government in Hong Kong is stifling Hong Kong’s freedom on the internet,” she said. “An open internet has always been the cornerstone of freedom in a place. The disruption of internet freedom also undermines the flow of information, freedom of communication and freedom of the press.”
Beijing introduced a national security law in Hong Kong last June aimed at suppressing differences in the semi-autonomous region after peaceful mass demonstrations against a now withdrawn extradition bill turned into months of protests against the government that led to sometimes violent collisions.
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The security law criminalizes acts of undermining, secession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces to intervene in the city’s affairs.
In terms of section 43 of the National Security Act, the police have the authority to ” order a person who has published information or the service provider concerned to delete the information or provide assistance ‘.