President Obama responded to questions yesterday about Twitter and the Chinese government’s web filtering in a town hall with university students yesterday in Shanghai, China.

The questions had been e-mailed to the U.S. Embassy and were read aloud by U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman: “In a country with 350 million Internet users and 60 million bloggers, do you know of the firewall?” And second, “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?”

Obama’s response was polite – it did not directly criticize the host country’s government – but firm in its defense of non-censorship:
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