China Restricts Internet Further
by Taylor Flatt on January 5th, 2009 at 8:27 pm EDT - 344 views
China, since last month, has gone another step further and has begun accusing sites like Google for displaying morally controversial items such as pornography and vulgar content. China departments claim they alert Google of their overabundant links to said sites, but have reported Google has implemented no countermeasures. China now threatens, “For those Web sites that repeatedly ignore warnings, we will publicize a few, punish a few and even close down a few”.
China is justifying their action by eluding that the populous is calling for action, “The vulgar trend has deeply harmed the mental and physical health of the young generation. Many parents are calling out: ‘Save our children’. They want the government to take drastic action.”
This looks like this trend will only continue on a downward spiral. With BBC being blocked along with NYTimes website, this will only get worse as the censorship issue is clouded by the cry of “help” by the people. Although there are bad things on the internet, it is like life; you cannot censor everything out and expect to live in a clean just world. Censorship is a long debated argument that has been and always will be a central issue. If China persists on their course of cutting the internet down, where will it stop?
Source: FT, UPI
Image courtesy of gallery.hd
Category: General, Industry News, Online
Tags: censorship, China, Internet, pornography, search
There are 3 comments so far
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Marklar37 - posted on January 6th, 2009 at 3:03 PM MST - Link
personally, I don’t believe this to be true (the Google part anyway). Why blame them? it is simply a search engine, what you type is what u see. If you search for music, you will find music, if you search for video game cheats, you will find those to. The same concept applies to pornography. However, Google and Yahoo give us safe search options and other methods to protect us as best as possible, but unfortunately, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to effectively block EVERY culturally unacceptable thing on the internet.
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Nathaniel Ed - posted on January 6th, 2009 at 6:36 PM MST - Link
True, but this is China we’re talking about.
Enough said. xD
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Taylor Flatt - posted on January 6th, 2009 at 11:07 PM MST - Link
Yes, very true. However, the case is different with China. They have laws prohibiting such things and must pursue such items especially when they are so available.
However, I do agree with everything you said. Google can’t be blamed for this since it is simply an indexing service and by blocking people out, you are not only denying information but also censoring people’s views.
There is a follow-up posted now…
http://www.pceverything.org/434/baidu-sorry-for-pornography/
