China’s War Against Pornography Targets Google
China’s War Against Pornography Targets Google
Posted 06/28/2009 at 11:10am
| by Justin Kerr
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The Chinese Health Ministry has been waging a very public war against pornography lately, and although they appeared to be softening their approach, new developments on Thursday have left Google scrambling. In what some people are calling “a rigged demo”, a CCTV state-owned television monopoly broadcast an interview demonstrating the dangers of the Google Suggested Search feature which attempts to auto complete simple search terms with popular related queries. At one point during the interview, when the host typed the word “son” into Google, a suggested search was returned stating, “abnormal relationship between son and mother”.
Google has formally commented on the matter, and has explained that the suggested search feature is based on popularity. In their defense, Google claims that nobody had entered this phrase for several months, but the term suddenly became popular in Beijing in the days leading up to the show. Though this is hardly conclusive evidence of a conspiracy, it certainly falls into the category of “suspicious” if true. Regardless, Google claims to be working on a new system that would help it remove all traces of pornography from its Chinese database, but describes it as “a major engineering effort”. "Google has been working to remove pornography from our search results in China, in accordance with our operating license there," the company said.
Google already filters a significant amount of political content from its search results, and critics fear that further censorship will only complicate the efforts of rights activists. It is also worth noting that the government agency charged with cracking down on pornography, is also responsible for suppressing illegal political activity. American officials have been critical of knee jerk restrictions on companies trying to comply with Chinas increasing demand for pornography censorship, and I’m sure we will hear more on this issue in the coming months.
What do you think of the ongoing developments in China?
Image Credit: floriswiegerinck.nl
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amitava
November 24, 2010 at 3:43am
This is an interesting topic on public war against pornography. I appreciate the idea. But it's very personal problem of China govt. So I think its not a big problem for the rest of the world. Las Vegas Escort
Denis63
June 29, 2009 at 2:30am
We have porn to thank for the internet. Why is China so against porn anyway? I can't see what is so bad about it.
-Denis
BaggerX
June 29, 2009 at 5:00pm
Up to now, their censoring of info has been rather easy to bypass. This should help them strengthen their abilities in that area. Now they can censor all sorts of stuff even easier because they will have all the technology in place to censor pornography. Nobody really speaks out against censoring that. So they get to designate whatever they want as pornography now, and then it will creep more and more towards other "undesirable" content.
Stockislander
June 28, 2009 at 8:18pm
It just shows that China is lagging behind in censorship sophistication... they're sort of like the US in the 60's and 70's. We've moved on to much better algorithms.
nightkiller
June 28, 2009 at 7:14pm
that we'd ever get a campfire singsong together with Mecca, The Vatican and Peking.
You choose a flightless bird as a mascot and wonder why it doesn't take off?
foamcup
June 28, 2009 at 2:08pm
Why should we care what's happening in China? Let them run the country the way they want.
johnny3144
June 28, 2009 at 5:55pm
the people of the "free world" cannot understand how can anybody live without being "free".
btw... CCTV have some nice program...it's not just a huge propaganda network(some, but not all). the show they host at lunar new year was pretty kickass! makes the new year at time square like look like childs play.
Justin.Kerr
June 28, 2009 at 2:18pm
China has a population of 1.3 billion, India has a population of 1.1 billion, and the US has a population of 300 million.
As these two nations evolve, they will have a massive impact, both online, and the world at large.
Mothership
June 28, 2009 at 12:40pm
What do I think? I think that our government after the election of President Obama has turned INCREASINGLY Socialist, which is the step right before Communism. AKA this has a strong chance of becoming America's future.
D3lt4
June 28, 2009 at 2:24pm
I remember someone listening to fox news on the radio (do they have a station)
the man speaking (on the radio) stated that America has the best health care system in the COUNTRY.
What a comment!Censorship sucks, but it has nothing to do with socialism as there are plenty of countries in Europe that have decent laws regarding this.
Seana7a7
June 28, 2009 at 11:52am
I would just like to add these
"The only good communist is a dead communist "
"There's only three real sports Football, Baseball and KILLING COMMUNISTS "
Well that's my piece said, it had no relation to the topic.
foamcup
June 28, 2009 at 1:55pm
If it has no relation to the topic, THEN DON'T FUCKING POST IT. Thanks for wasting my fucking bandwidth you fucking moron.
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