Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact, it is just the opposite.”

–Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang

If China wants to correct the “false impression” that it fears the Internet, ending its paranoid blocking of Web services would be a good place to start. This morning, Beijing extended the Great Firewall of China, restricting Internet access to Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Bing, among others. As confirmation of this, Herdict–a Harvard University site that monitors Internet accessibility–shows a spike in reports claiming that Twitter is inaccessible in China this morning.

The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal reports similarly.

The move–presumably part of the Chinese government’s efforts to censor media ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this Thursday–was more an inevitability than anything else. Like YouTube and blogging services WordPress and Blogger, Twitter provides Chinese citizens with an outlet for dissent and self-expression, things for which the Chinese government has a profound distaste.

So, it comes as little surprise that the repressive government in Beijing has blocked it. It did the same thing to YouTube back in March.

“It’s just part of life here,” said Beijing-based Twitterer Kaiser Kuo. “If anything surprises me, it’s that it took them so long.” 

I have a request for comment in to Twitter and will update if/when I hear back.

“By tying together our audience and context, we can have even more relevant experiences,” said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of Front Doors and Network Services at Yahoo (YHOO). “All our properties are going to be socialized…and fundamentally, it is going to change how information is consumed.”

The now-socialized Yahoo Mail is to go live today at 1 p.m. PST. My Yahoo, the Yahoo Toolbar, Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music go live later this week.

And Google (GOOG) is serving up ads on it.

To be fair, though, it’s no easy task for the search giant to keep Blogger malware-free. So in some sense, the fact that the service hosts just two percent of all malware and not 20 percent is an achievement, as Sophos’s Graham Cluley notes. “If you think about it, Blogger/Blogspot’s position is probably not surprising–it’s a phenomenally popular platform for people to create their own Web pages (blogs), and gives Internet users the ability to comment on other people’s blogs,” Cluley said in a post to his blog. “Inevitably, there are ne’er-do-wells out there who will try and abuse a great service like that, and try and plant malware and malicious links. For its part, Google–the company who own Blogspot–takes security seriously, and works hard to shut down Web pages serving up malware.”