Chinese search engine censured

Baidu allegedly helping spread sexually explicit photos

[balam]

AP via Yahoo! News: Chinese search engine censured [news.yahoo.com]

China's top Internet search engine, Baidu.com, has been censured by a government-sponsored watchdog for allegedly helping spread sexually explicit photos that appear to feature several Hong Kong stars.

[bill]

It's really hard to go after SEs for indexing content. I wonder how far this censure went. Given the amount of time that went by since the scandal broke until the SEs were warned I'd say it's pretty near impossible for any SE to stop the progress of this scandal. Even if Baidu could clear itself of all reference to these files there are a ton of sites/services outside China that also have these files. This finger-in-the-dike solution won't do much.

[martinibuster]

>>>Given the amount of time that went by since the scandal broke until the SEs were warned...

That's really interesting. Given that they're operating in China, I'm surprised they have to be warned. My perception from California was that they'd have a whole department in charge of self-censoring at Baidu. Interesting that they did not self-censor.

[bill]

A lot of this broke in the English press, and the files got out to the English file sharing networks. Also it started in Hong Kong, which is still a special area of China. Had this started within the confines of the mainland it may not have progressed quite as far as it has.