China's War on Porn

Billions worldwide kick off the new year with ambitious resolutions, and the Chinese government has its own set of lofty January goals: to reduce Internet pornography.  As a result, they've targeted 19 major web portals and sites, like Baidu, Sohu, and Google./span>

The month long campaign, initiated by the Ministry of Public Security and other agencies, provides Internet sites two options: clean up their image, or risk being shut down. /span>

Cai Mingzhao, a deputy director of the State Council Information Office told a meeting national teleconference that "immediate action is needed to purify the internet environment," so the government won't hesitate to "expose, punish or even shut down those infamous websites that refuse to correct their wrongdoing."/span>

Despite the harsh rhetoric and high aspirations of this effort, I don't know how effective it will ultimately be.  For starters, even with some of the most extensive Internet-filtering technology in the world, the Chinese leadership has been combating Internet porn for several years, and has been unable to "purify" the Internet./span>

Even after the new regulations were released, The Times of India reports that it was still easy to find pornographic content on many of the targeted websites.  Since most of the sites, including Google and Baidu are portals, which direct users to other sites, this information is hardly surprising./span>

Considering that these portals do not generate their own content, even with a safe search in the most secure settings, it's highly probable that some type of pornographic image could slip through their search mechanisms.  Furthermore, the campaign is only lasting for one month.  Is this enough time for a developer to shape a new algorithm that would filter out all objectionable content and pornography, while still providing a user satisfactory search results?  /span>

Beyond those issues, the campaign only lasts for one month.  Even if, by an extreme miracle, the Chinese government is able to filter porn out of the systems by the end of January, what happens in February?   What incentive do websites and web portals have to change the current system?/span>

Perhaps everything in China/st1 :country-region>'s world wide webs will be squeaky clean by February, but something tells me that they'll probably fire up the same campaign next year.