Beijing — China, the world’s biggest Internet market by users, today announced nationwide plans to initiate a major crackdown against popular websites, including singling out the dominant search engines Google and Baidu, which officials accused of spreading pornography and vulgarity, by China’s Ministry of Public Security, as part of the latest Net Nanny campaign, reports Reuters.
China’s Ministry of Public Security along with six other government agencies declared the campaign at a meeting on Monday, including a list of websites which contain “large amounts of low and vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths,” stated an official Xinhua News Agency report posted on its Web site.
An offensive atmosphere on the Internet has badly damaged the physical and mental health of youth, Cai Ming-zhao, deputy press chief of the State Council, said at the meeting. Participants asked all related government agencies to “strictly execute the law,” Xinhua said.
Each of the 19 Internet operators website listed is annotated with either a remark that the website had been given a notice to take effective action to clean up its content, but had failed to swiftly remove “vulgar” content and had not heeded warnings from censors, it said.
Google and Baidu were both criticized for not taking effective action, while all the other websites on the list did not quickly delete offensive content. Web sites that refuse to change after receiving warnings risk penalties and closure, Xinhua said.
Pornography is banned in China; however, Baidu dominates the Chinese web search and advertising market with an estimated two-thirds of the audience and Google Inc., China’s biggest search engines, provide links to “a huge quantity of pornographic sites,” according to a statement from the China Internet Illegal Information Center today.
The statement also accused the biggest Chinese Web portals Sina and Sohu, including a number of video sharing sites and online bulletin boards, that it said have problematic photos, blogs and postings.
China’s ruling Communist Party, though always on guard to threats and clamp its grip on information has launched many such censorship efforts before, targeting pornography, political criticism and web scams. But officials signaled tougher steps this time.
The operation also corresponds with Communist Party efforts to smother dissent and protest as the economy slows and as China enters a year of sensitive anniversaries, especially the 20th year since the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989.
“Some websites have exploited loopholes in laws and regulations,” said Cai Mingzhao, a deputy chief of the State Council Information Office, who chaired the meeting, according to a report on an official news website (www.china.com.cn).
“They have employed all kinds of ways to distribute content that is low-class, crude and even vulgar, gravely damaging mores on the Internet.”
The Financial Times reported on Monday that the Chinese government is strengthening censors with more advanced filtering software to catch banned content.
The CIIIRC demanded that these websites “seriously clean up their unhealthy and vulgar content,” adding that they hope netizens will also supervise this and readily report on “illegal and unhealthy information on the Internet.”
Cui Jin, a public relations official for Google in mainland China and Sun Yao, Baidu’s PR representative declined to comment when contacted by Reuters, both saying they were unaware of the announcement.