Beijing, China — Search engine behemoth Google pledged to step-up its efforts to fight Internet pornography in China, following China’s massive campaign on Friday to eradicate pornography from its Chinese Web pages as state media reported authorities had shut down some of its search services, and it now has Google in its crosshairs.
The engineering effort may be initiated to straightening out Google.cn from search indexes associated with other Google search sites, like Google.com. The Chinese authorities have blocked some results delivered by Google’s search engines, claiming they are lustful or obscene.
Google executives in China made contact with representatives of the Chinese government on Thursday “to discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches,” a company spokesperson confirmed Friday.
Google is making quick moves to accommodate the government, no doubt acutely sensitive to the risk of losing any of its search market share in the country.
According to reports published in Xinhua, the government-run news agency, Chinese authorities began blocking certain “Chinese-language results from any country.”
“We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results,” Google spokesperson Scott Rubin said in an e-mail. “This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results.”
According to Xinhua quoting the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (CIIRC) as saying that Google’s Chinese portal was still providing links to many obscene pictures, videos and articles despite warnings in January and April.
The report gave no other details.
This is not the first time Google has been assailed in China for directing people to “vulgar and unhealthy” content. In a press conference in January, China’s State Council Information Office, in conjunction with six other government ministries, criticized Chinese search engine Baidu and Google, among others, and denounced online pornography and vulgarity as a threat to the mental and physical health of Chinese citizens.
In a blog post about that porn crackdown, Rebecca MacKinnon, assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center, observed that “the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content than smut.”
“Google has continually taken measures against vulgar content, particularly material that is harmful to children, on the Internet in China,” a statement by the company said.
“Google is currently stepping up its efforts in this regard.”
A nonprofit group devoted to “traditional American values” on Friday followed in China’s footsteps, calling on Google to be more vigilant about limiting access to online porn.
The Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute released a self-conducted study to back a demand for Google-owned YouTube to be more “family friendly.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request to clarify the impact of China’s censorship demand on queries from residents of China sent through search sites located outside of China.
Neither Google officials nor authorities that handle Internet supervision could immediately be reached to clarify whether “content based on foreign-language searches” includes sensitive political terms.