In China, the use of certain social media sites, such as Facebook (FB  ) and Google (GOOGL  ), is blocked by a censorship program commonly referred to as the Great Firewall. Until recently, the messaging app Whatsapp was the only social network wasn't blocked. Now, it's being censored: users are unable to send photos and videos, and are left with just text messaging. Given the impending political election season in China, government appears to be tightening its grip on the internet.

Along with the upcoming election, The recent focus on censorship has primarily been driven by a flurry of controversial events such as the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo's death in detention, a Chinese billionaire's allegations of graft by senior leaders, and the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover. The manifestations of the renewed focus on censorship has been seen through a new cybersecurity law that was released last month.

© Etan Liam / Flickr.com

Great Firewall, the largest censorship system in the world, began with the introduction of the Golden Shield Project in 2003. Using a combination of hardware and word-screening software, China began to censor words that were too politically strong or that may lead to protest. After internet users' responded by using photos to express their sentiments, Chinese censors began to remove images from group chats. China's focus on censorship has inevitably led to the ban of Facebook in 2009, during to ethnic riots, and the ban of Instagram in 2014 due to pro-democracy protests.

Currently with WhatsApp, the difficulties that users have been having with the app are said to have originated from the government. Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cytographer, expanded on the government's role in Chinese censorship, stating that "According to the analysis that [they] ran today on WhatsApp's infrastructure, it seems that the Great Firewall is imposing censorship that selectively targets WhatsApp functionalities."

© Maridav / bigstockphoto.com

While China can exercise censorship over WhatsApp, a service that is offered outside China, the government cannot censor individual messages, meaning that there is no current algorithm towards filtering out images over the social network app. Due to this, China's censorship program prevents the sending of images for every WhatsApp user in China. China based political book publisher Bao Pu explored China's approach, asserting that if you "hire a million network police, it still wouldn't be enough to filter 1.4 billion people's messages, but if you have a machine doing it, it can instantly block everything. It doesn't matter if it's a billion messages or 10 billion."

China's approach to censorship, along with their recent cyber security laws, poses an issue for businesses outside of China who may be apprehensive towards working under a strict environment. Meanwhile, China's method of censorship may face an uncertain future given that the government cannot currently finely filter images. Nevertheless, China plans to block certain virtual private networks (VPNs), networks that are usually used to circumvent China's censorship, by February 2018.