Beijing— Chinese authorities have initiated a tough fight to “purify” its cyber media against pornography, has blocked another 50 websites containing porn and vulgar content after getting Goggle and other search engines to apologize for carrying porn and lewd content, bringing the total to 91, the number of sites that have been blocked in less than a week, state-run media reported Sunday.
The action now seems to be part of the latest measures in the total banning of pornography and as anyone can imagine, the Internet is their biggest problem. The official Xinhua News Agency reported that 41 Web sites had been shut down earlier in the week.
It is relatively simple to access porn over the Internet, but China has an ace up its sleeve. The government crackdown initially involved 19 search engines including Google and Chinese portals like Baidu, who were asked to remove the sexually lewd content from their sites.
The government then extended its campaign to cover 14 more sites including the Microsoft-run MSN. A total of 91 sites have been shut down or blocked since last Thursday as part of a month-long campaign that the government says is aimed at stamping out online pornography, the Xinhua news agency said.
Circulating pornography is illegal in China and authorities urged law-breakers to turn themselves into police, warning that tougher measures would come in the following days, the report said. It also scolded Google and other sites for not reacting immediately to its orders resulting in apologies from the sites.
The Chinese government has been using sophisticated equipment and software for blocking entire web sites or specific pages of certain web sites that do not meet with the moral and political standards of the authorities. But the main focus of censorship has mostly been for sites that contain politically sensitive material.
MSN came in for attack for having a large amount of inappropriate images on its film channel and some “selected pictures” in its social messaging section.
Internet police is also believed to be active in posting the government’s views in chat rooms and bulletin boards besides urging web users to expose websites that cross the line.
The report gave few details on which sites were shut down:
China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies launched the drive against sites that post or link to content that “harms public morality” and corrupts the nation’s youth, Xinhua said.
The government is concerned because majority of Internet users happened to be younger people below the age of 30. The country has the largest population of Internet users estimated at 253 million in June by the state-sponsored China Internet Network Information Center.
Google said Wednesday it had deleted all links to vulgar material from its search indexes and would go all-out to prevent such material re-appearing.
“Google is willing to be a law-abiding citizen in China,” it said in a statement.
China’s communist rulers generally exercise strict control over the Internet, and officials have warned the latest campaign would include tougher measures, without giving specifics.
This might sound like good reasoning, but if china wants the world to think that as a country they are more open minded than believed, banning anything that might sound like a threat is not the way to go.