[photopress:IT_censorship.jpg,full,alignright]The Ministry of Information Industry has announced it has ordered Chinese search engines to remove illegal and unhealthy information from their search results. The web sites, including Google China, China Yahoo and Baidu.com, must do it with immediate effect.
The ministry said they should map out a procedure on how to dispose of illegal information, how to manage content and how to deal with users’ complaints.
No definition was given to specify what is considered illegal or unhealthy content although a ministry official who only gave his surname as Wang said pornography was one kind: ‘The search engines know what they should do.’
Earlier this month China’s press and publication regulator started a campaign to close pornographic web sites. The regulator also ordered all web sites to delete 40 pornographic novels that it had blacklisted.
It is quite impossible for an outsider to make a judgment as to how big the problem might be. But one can do a comparison. In Britain a source working with the police said that 175,000 users had been identified as downloading pornography involving children.
You could argue that there is little harm in that but that it a false argument. If no one downloaded from these sites then the pornographic pictures would not be made and less children would be harmed. How many children, how big the effect is difficult to estimate but, plainly, banning such sites makes sense and that has happened in the UK.
In Thailand stricter censorship applies but there the censor puts up a notice explaining why the site has been banned. Thus China is not alone in trying to censor the Internet. It is a question of degree.
Our illustration is NOT banned in the UK. The lady appears on a site offering the services of London escorts. This splendid model costs an even more splendid RMB38,000 ($5,000) a night. True.
Source: China.org.cn and research.