State media blames Google for porn

Searching for “son” brings up some compromising results

Update: According to Xinhua, the government told Google.cn to “temporarily stop searching overseas web pages and halt its auto-complete function,” in addition to the overhaul and clean-up mentioned below.

Update 2: ESWN translates － Gao Ye, who was interviewed by CCTV’s Focus Report about Google (see below) turned out to be the program’s intern.

The latest development in the government’s Internet cleansing is a CCTV attack on Google China for pornographic content, which aired last night. Supposedly, one of the crimes is searching for son (“儿子”, picture, left), which results in an automatic list of erotic searches mostly revolving around incest between mother and son.

This is only one instance of how Google China has not followed government orders to clean up their site.

Netizens have criticized this as a reaction against the PR and media disaster of the Green Dam.

For example, Keso, influential IT blogger wrote that they must be very skilled to come up with such a crude way of searching Google China － translated here:

A netizen said: “The main contradiction of socialism at the beginning stages is the mass’ intelligence, which grows daily, and the continuous lowering of the morality of officials at different levels”. This is so true. For example the Green Dam, even if you want to defend it it’s hard, because it’s a piece of junk that costed 41.7 million yuan. Another example, motivating the most superior propaganda machine to concentrate on attacking one company: this is totally the traditional way of viewing the masses as idiots, which has been the same for tens of years.

A friend told me that he has been using Google for 10 years, but can never find porn, why could they find it straight away? I said that this is the difference between ordinary people and experts. You can’t find it, because you haven’t the skills, and your spirit is not as polluted, for example you won’t search for “boobs” in English and then translate it into Chinese, right? Sub-standard.

I really pity those “search experts”, all they do all day is search for “sex”, “boobs” and other vulgar and perverted words, and they can still remain pure: that’s not easy.

This translation of CCTV’s Network News report and commentary is a contribution from YumeYao:

Local Time (GMT+8) 19:00 ~ 19:30, Jun 18th.

CCTV’s Network News (新闻联播) presented a piece of news which indicated that Google is providing “vulgar and unhealthy” content. The title was “China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center criticizes Google China for transmitting vulgar and unhealthy information”. On Network News this piece lasted about one minute.

The full content is a male voice, reading a note published by “China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center” on morning of June 18th. The full content is as below:

In recent days, China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center received the public’s compliant and proved true that Google China transmits vulgar and unhealthy information widely, which violates certain terms and goes against common morality, damaging the public’s rights.

Earlier in January and April, Google China was exposed by the CIIIRC for containing vulgar and unhealthy links. Recently the public complained to the CIIIRC again. After our inspection, we found that there still exists a large quantity of vulgar and unhealthy information within the Google China website, which consists of many vulgar and pornographic images, videos and texts.

Google China did not follow China’s laws to filter vulgar contents, lots of foreign vulgar information on the Internet is transmitted into China via Google China.

CIIIRC here criticize “Google China” and requires “Google China” to clean up all vulgar and unhealthy contents, suggesting that certain departments punish the site, and hopes that the public continues to review Google.

Later, 19:40~19:55.

“Focus Report” (焦点访谈) on CCTV 1 after Network News featured this topic again.

In this program, CCTV used some very childish means, including the “faking” of public comments”:

One college students said that one of his schoolmates hadn’t accessed unhealthy sites ever since the government’s forceful closing of unhealthy sites, but started visiting again because he could find lots of search results via Google.

In this affair, the key point is “Greem Dam”. CCTV “reported” this news because the Department of Industry and Information’s Green Dam Project is doubted. So it uses the media to back some of the control.

This report is also on the front page of today’s Beijing Youth Daily, reporting that Google China responded last night: the company has already been investigating the vulgar content, including the ones concerning children. But that after these reports will intensify these investigations.