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As with many great technological advances, at the forefront of people’s desire for unfettered access to the Internet lies… in porn. Just ask the thousands of Chinese web users who have networked together and shared their collective ingenuity in recent weeks, all in the name of accessing the Twitter page of a Japanese porn star.<\/p>\n
When China-based fans of adult film star Aoi Sola heard that she’d started her own Twitter page a few weeks back, the hunt was on for a successful way to vault over, tunnel under or blast through the so-called “Great Firewall” the Chinese government has set up to forbid citizens from accessing Twitter and other sites. <\/p>\n
And so Aoi fans began sharing and distributing their hacks for getting around the blockade. There is now an e-mail address, mytwitterclient@gmail.com, that provides an auto response e-mail with instructions on how to access Twitter pages.<\/p>\n
“In China you can get anything you want on the Internet, you just have to want to bad enough,” said David Wolf, a Beijing-based tech industry expert tells AOL News. “It’s simple for someone with some minimal technical acumen” to scale the Great Firewall… But that means that it’s too difficult for most of China.”<\/p>\n
Aoi now has over 50,000 Twitter followers; it’s not known how many of them are from China. Additionally, it’s likely that many people are checking her Tweets without actually becoming “followers.”<\/p>\n
Josephine Ho, coordinator of the Center for the Study of Sexualities at Taiwan’s National Central University, explains the lure of Aoi’s Twitter and other similar sites thusly: <\/p>\n
The reason there’s such eagerness is because there’s such a strong clampdown on sex and sex-related information, not only in China but also in Taiwan and Hong Kong… Sexual information is hard to get at, and Japan just happens to have a sophisticated porn industry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n