Google in the Line of Fire From China for Showing Porn
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Chinese authorities have taken an extremely firm stance in the face of increasing pornography. According to Google, Beijing has asked the search engine giant to remove a certain search parameter that propagates and allows easy access to pornography.
According to the New York Times, Chinese officials held a crucial meeting with the top brass of Google’s China Operations, warning them to remove certain search features that indexes and shows porn or face severe punishments.
China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center or CIIRC, that is a government funded internet supervisor, in its report pointed fingers at Google for including porn search results and threatened the company with serious legal consequences.
With this looming threat on its head, Google has disabled its Google Suggest feature that provides users with a list of relative searches to the search string used by the users. After the meeting with Google Chinese Division executives, Chinese state run television network, China Central Television, ran this story along with a demonstration, showing as to how a simple search term ’son’ could produce lewd and unacceptable search results on Google China.
In response to this growing controversy, Google in a statement said;
“We have been continually working to deal with pornographic content, and material that is harmful to children, on the Web in China.”
However, the internet media censorship currently in practice by the Chinese government has not gone down too well with many Chinese internet users. Mostly, they are outraged by Beijing’s plan to embed and install an internet censorship software on all the new computers that would would be sold in China from July 1st onwards. Many believe that this software known as Green Dam-Youth Escort is another way of subverting websites and other online media that might have a political tone to them and thus would be unacceptable to the Chinese government.
