Google and Baidu Are Told to Threaten Morals in China

China is well-known for its strict approach to dealing with websites, blocking everything that the country’s government does not consider to be appropriate for the eyes of its citizens and demanding websites to comply if they want to remain in the huge Chinese internet market. But today’s news is even more extravagant than usually as Chinese officials target the largest websites, including the most popular search engines in the country – the local leader Baidu and Google.

The reason is not quite usual either: these sites are accused of threatening morals by spreading pornography and vulgarity online while usually the blocked websites are accused of delivering news (especially related to Tibet or Taiwan) in a manner that is not considered to be suitable to the Chinese government.

The new campaign has been announced on local TV after a meeting earlier today between Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies. This campaign that marks the beginning of the year is intended to eliminate vulgar content from the web and the targets are already known and include a number of major websites. These websites have not been announced officially but Google and Baidu are two names that are already known.

These websites have already received requests to remove objectionable content but failed to act properly – hence they will now be targeted in a campaign that is supposed to have the largest scale and also be the strictest of all that have already taken place in China.

It will obviously be interesting to watch this new round of censorship in China and how it will affect both the freedom of speech (already virtually non-existent in the country) as well as businesses of international companies (like Google, for example) making money off the lucrative internet business in China. And it will be even more interesting to see how Google will learn not to index porn content and not to serve it to Chinese users if the search giant wants to stay in the market – and it sure wants so the measures must be elaborated and discussed with the Chinese officials as I have a feeling Google will very much want to comply.

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