If you're connecting to the Internet from China, you haven't been able to access YouTube since Monday. Not only a particular part of the site, but all of it. The reason is a video purportedly depicting Chinese security personnel beating Tibetans; the Chinese government now claims the video is fake.

Fake or not, now that one of the biggest sites on the Internet is unaccessible to a huge number of people, it has everyone's attention. Normally, the video would probably be noticed by a handful of people interested in the matter; this way, everyone has seen it (or heard of it).

This is not the first time that China has blocked YouTube (the ban usually gets lifted within a couple of days), and it's probably not the last. But one has to wonder how effective these bans are, since tools like Twitter make it incredibly easy for people to spread the news about incidents like this one. Proving that a video is fake would probably be a much better tactic than banning a site viewed by millions of people every day, and then claiming you're not afraid of the Internet; it just doesn't hold water.