blocked from within the country, and the number is believed to have been growing constantly. Banned sites include YouTube (from March 2009), Facebook (from July 2009), Google services (including Search, Google+, Maps, Docs, Drive, Sites, and Picasa), Twitter, Instagram, Dropbox, Foursquare, and Flickr. Google was planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, blocking information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, but it was terminated. Certain search engine terms are blocked as well. Reporters have also suggested that China's internet censorship of foreign websites may also be a means of forcing mainland Chinese users to rely on China's own e-commerce industry, thus self-insulating their economy. In 2011, although China-based users of many Google services such as Google+ did not always find the services entirely blocked, they were nonetheless throttled so that users could be expected to become frustrated with the frequent timeouts and switch to the faster, more reliable services of Chinese competitors. According to BBC, local Chinese businesses such as Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, some of the world's largest internet enterprises, benefited from the way China has blocked international rivals from the market, assisting domestic companies. More recently, under current CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, there has been a big push to improve information technology and use the improved technology as a means to further promote propaganda and the CCP agenda. This initiative has been successful, and by the end of 2015, almost 700 million Chinese citizens had internet access. However, with this improvement in technological access, there is now much more efficient communication regarding current events and government issues through social media, resulting in broader discussions amongst Chinese netizens on government policies and affairs; the government has implemented rules and preventative measures to counter the spread of negative public opinion regarding the CCP and governmental affairs. For example, Article 246. Section 1 in Criminal Law states that unlawful posts that are shared over 500 times or seen over 5000 times will result in the poster being charged with up to 3 years in prison. The regulation of public opinion was tightened after the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference in August 2013. At the conference, General Secretary Xi Jinping underscored the importance of "ideological work" in strengthening and uniting China; more specifically, he strongly emphasized the need to suppress controversies, "mistaken viewpoints", and rumors on every public platform. Shortly after this conference,