China Wants Clean Internet

China is launching a new campaign to eliminate offensive and suggestive material from the Internet.

China wants its citizens to have access to a nice Internet, free of offensive, vulgar and suggestive material. To that end, it’s named 19 sites that have ignored its requests to remove unapproved material, including Google and Baidu, which ranks ahead of Google in China as a search engine. Failure to comply could see them shut down.

Seven ministries in China are working together to clean up the Internet. On Chinese Central Television, one official, Cai Mingzhao, said:

"We will continue to expose, punish or close down websites that have a lot of vulgar content."

However, the BBC notes that there are fears this new campaign will also be used to muffle political dissent, and one of the sites on China’s list, Tianya, is popular with people who are critical of China’s rulers.