The lonely Chinese man who wants to satisfy his sexual needs online, faces a challenge that just got a little bigger. The Chinese government has blocked 244 new porn sites over the last week, reports Chinese news agency Xinhua. In its battle against “vulgar” content, China already made 700 online victims. These targets were unregistered and broke laws about the distribution of nasty content (meaning sexual movies, photos and whatnot).
The campaign will last for a month and isn’t limited to websites. Mobile phone games, online novels and radio programs can be blocked as well. Major Internet companies like Google and Baidu also got a public warning because they didn’t react fast enough when forbidden content showed up in their search results.
The Communist Party’s efforts aren’t limited to sexual content. Due to the 20th anniversary of the government’s bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, forbidden political content is also subject to blocking.
When I participated in the China 2.0 tour, Shel Israel and I experimented with Google and forbidden topics like Tianamen Square. On his personal blog, Israel wrote the following:
At dinner one night, Ernst Jan Pfauth typed into Google “Tienanmen Square Massacre” and got the 19-year-old story of troops killing about 400 students. A minute later he typed in “Falun Gong,” the banned religious group and got blocked. The block lated about 10 minutes then he was free to surf again.
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According to Xinhua’s reports, it’s gonna be a whole lot harder to find similar results right now.
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