Did China’s Internet Censors Forward Me to a Transsexual Porn Site?

Yesterday I tried to load up Youtube as I do almost every day here in China. Business as usually. I jumped over to a couple of other tabs while the site loaded but when I returned what was on the screen didn’t appear to be the site I requested. Though my browser address said www.youtube.com and the tab icon was that of Youtube, what was on the screen wasn’t offering me my usually assortment of lame ass self-improvement videos and obscure documentaries but “the new era of transsexual porn” from a site called Trans500.com.

Definitely not Youtube.

Wondering how this had happened I checked my VPN (the program that allows me to bypass China’s firewall). I’d been bumped off and wasn’t connected, meaning I was at the whims of China’s army of internet monitors. Sometimes they do a little more than block sites:

“According to Greatfire, Chinese users attempting to access banned sites have been redirected to foreign porn sites, random sites in Russia, and to a site owned by the South Korean government.”

I had to crack a smile at the thought of a couple of young Chinese guys sitting in some internet censorship dungeon giggling to themselves about how they’re redirecting users who want to use a banned video sharing site to — OMG! — a transvestite porn site.

Apparently, censors are human too.