China says it arrested thousands of people over the course of 2009 in a crackdown on Web pornography and says it will continue the push in the new year, according to a report.
The Chinese government announced late this week that the sweeping effort resulted in 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal investigations, a fourfold increase over the year prior, Reuters reports. And those numbers could rise still higher. Reuters says China's Ministry of Public Security warned that in 2010 it will intensify punishments for illegal Internet operations, ramp up information monitoring, and press Internet service providers to use preventive technology.
China's efforts to eradicate porn and other frowned-upon content from the Web are controversial, but they are not new. The country has blocked user-generated content sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube--though savvy users have found workarounds that allow them to access the sites. And it has successfully persuaded independent companies to comply with its initiative. Google acknowledged last year that the Chinese government asked it to disable a search feature with the goal of censoring pornography. (It was also rumored, though Google would not confirm, that the Chinese government asked the search company to censor searches related to Tiananmen Square around the 20th anniversary of the violent end to student protests there.) It also ran into problems in the summer of 2009, when a plan to require desktop-monitoring software called Green Dam Youth Escort on all new PCs backfired.
Microsoft has responded swiftly to suggestions that its Bing search engine seems to throw up ads alongside the keyword "pornography".
In a post Thursday, I outlined some of the suspicions that surrounded the appearance of ads for Bing next to searches for fleshy entertainment.
A Microsoft representative declared in an e-mail: "Microsoft has not purchased the keyword 'pornography,' and this term has never been in our AdWords account."
This will serve as a considerable relief to many upstanding citizens.
The company representative continued: "It is our policy on the Bing marketing team that we do not have any adult content as part of any of our keyword buys or other marketing campaigns."
However, Microsoft has vivid views about how this alleged relationship between "binging" and films featuring somewhat less talented actors naked might have come about.
"The keyword that seems to be triggering these results is 'free videos,'" the Microsoft representative explained. "We are following up with Google to understand why this ad is showing up in these types of queries."
That should be a very interesting conversation. One looks forward to reading a transcript.
Google has acknowledged that the Chinese government asked it to disable a search feature with the goal of censoring pornography, but it still won't say whether the government ordered tighter censorship around the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The New York Times reported Friday that Chinese government officials ordered Google to remove the search feature--known as Google Suggest--that displays related search terms based on the original query typed into the search bar or face unspecified punishment. Apparently some queries brought up related results with suggestive implications, leading to criticism from China's state-run media and government officials prior to Friday's move.
Google has long faced a difficult dilemma in China, reconciling the Chinese government's insistence that Internet companies censor their products with the company's desire to improve the world's access to information; not to mention the demands of shareholders for profits.
But despite acknowledging direct government intervention over pornography, Google is still unwilling to say whether or not the Chinese government ordered a temporary muzzle on its search engine around June 4, the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government's violent crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square.
For several days, Google.cn blocked all results for searches on Tiananmen Square, including ones that were entirely unrelated to the events of that day in 1989. Those results, such as travel-related sites, were restored last week.
In this case, however, Google was quite willing to state that it met with Chinese government officials to "discuss problems with the Google.cn service and its serving of pornographic images and content based on foreign language searches," a Google representative said in a statement.
The company is also putting some serious effort into making sure it complies with China's antipornography drive. "We are undertaking a thorough review of our service and taking all necessary steps to fix any problems with our results. This has been a substantial engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed the large majority of the problem results," Google said.
Just in case those efforts don't work, China still plans to require PC companies to install desktop monitoring software later this year, according to a separate report in The New York Times debunking claims earlier in the week that China was reconsidering the requirement in the wake of security problems with its Green Dam software.
In a move to stop the spread of child pornography on the Internet, German officials will soon be asking ISPs to filter out Web sites they deem offensive, according to news magazine Der Spiegel.
German regulatory officials have been working with Google and other search engines, providing them with a blacklist of sites to block, according to the article, which was reported on Google Blogoscoped on Friday. Google already excludes from its German and French search results content that is pro-Nazi.
There have been other censorship efforts recently related to images of children. Internet service providers in the U.K. last month began blocking access to Wikipedia after Britain's Internet Watch Foundation took issue over an image of a naked young girl that appeared on the cover of an album by the rock band The Scorpions. Several days later, the watchdog group changed its mind after discussing the situation with the Wikimedia Foundation.
The Internet Watch Foundation's child porn blacklist also has resulted in some ISPs blocking access to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, The Register reported this week.
- prev
- 1
- next
