Google to Reduce Porn Results

Following criticism from the Chinese Internet watchdog, China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre (CIIRC), Google.cn has promised to do everything possible to remove pornography from its portal. The watchdog has insisted that Google block all unacceptable porn sites from showing in search results as it was “disseminating pornographic and vulgar information”.

Over 1000 websites have already been blocked by authorities for “distributing porn and other lewd material” and more than 4,000 other websites have been closed. As a result, Google has taken this latest warning seriously and says a thorough review of their services and steps are being taken to fix any problems associated with their search results in China.

Although critics are saying this latest crackdown on Google – and other major websites – is an extension of the government’s surveillance system which would see every PC sold in China fitted with a filtering device. The Chinese government has defended itself saying that while users have a choice of whether or not to enable the filtering device; their recent crackdown on websites was to deal with the large amount of “foreign Internet pornographic information” that was being made available to Internet users (almost 250 million) in China.