Charlie Smith, cofounder of the censorship in China tracking website GreatFire.org, said there’s been a substantial rise in the use of VPN services during the past year.

“This is an immediate consequence of the authorities obstructing more sites in China, causing tremendous annoyance,” he said. The knock-on effects of this could be seen through increased action on blocked websites like Twitter.

Nevertheless, Smith said the authorities have lately cracked down hard on the most famous commercial VPNs.

“New upstarts might garner the same interest once they reach critical masses of users. I am hoping that this will not really happen, but recent trends suggest that this is going to be the likely end result.”

Based on sources, the extremely popular internet shopping platform Taobao in the nation sells VPNs, with key word searches for the services obstructed. A search on the Baidu in China shows more folks are requesting where to purchase VPNs, although there are a lot of websites selling them.

Adam Fisk, chief executive of complimentary peer to peer internet censorship circumvention applications Lantern, said VPNs are especially exposed because their protocols can be quickly targeted by censors to blocking.

In comparison Lantern uses a mix of peer to peer connections that are international and tunnelling traffic through services censors do not need to block.

“To me this is a continuous struggle with continuing innovation on either side.

Another approach to applying censorship is always to delete content on social networking websites. Yet, based on a source, codewords are often used to get round censors on the Whatsapp equivalent WeChat in China.

“Over the long term I believe the latter will certainly win, but it is uncertain how much time it’s going to take,” he added.