Baidu Inc Warned By Chinese Government Over Porn Content

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Chinese Authorities have warned Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU), search engine giant in China, to weed out the obscene content found on its online storage service. A report from Xinhua, citing a statement from by Beijing’s anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications office, noted that the Storage service of Baidu, which resembles Dropbox, hosted Porn content.

Baidu asked to take strict measures

The search engine company was asked by the authorities to delete all suspicious files, and pull down the accounts that upload such content, and after that present a report on its clean-up effort.

Baidu’s casual approach towards its service was questioned by the authorities, and the company has been ordered to edit its content. Back in April, the government constituted an anti-pornography campaign under which the Chinese authorities aim to ‘clean up’ the internet. Since Xi Jinoing became the President of the country, effort towards cleaning up internet has increased.

Sina, another popular internet firm in China, paid a fine of $828,224 in May on the order of Beijing authorities for allowing access to ‘unhealthy and indecent content’ on its online reading channel along with its main website, according to Reuters.

Clean the web campaign

There was no response from Baidu, but the company posted on its forum that it has started tracking user’s shared files for any such content. Back in April, the company posted, “In order to cleanse cyber environment, Baidu Cloud thoroughly bans the sharing of pornographic content… Users are welcome to report improper resources.”

The campaign dubbed as “cleaning of the web 2014” will check target websites, online advertisement, forum posts, as well as, smart phone applications. The hunt down of such contents led to the closure of 1,222 websites and deletion of about 2,200 pieces of text having pornographic information, as per the officially released figures in June.

Previously, portals like Sina.com and Qvod were warned by the authorities, who cautioned that harsh measures to the extent of license revoking can be taken if the sites are found guilty of spreading pornographic content.

In a separate development, Baidu was slapped with a lawsuit by a plaintiff alias “Xiao Zhen,” where he alleged that Chongqing-based Xinyupiaoxiang Clinic was the first search result when searched for the “gay treatment,” and upon enquiring it was found that the facility has a counterfeit psychiatry license and suggested electroshock treatment as part of the conversion treatment as per the report from Beijing Times newspaper.

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