14 DAY TRIAL // Baidu.com owns the Chinese search engine market with dominance, very much like Google does in the United States. And, just like Google oversees, it too has some problems with the content it circulates around the Internet. While the Mountain View-based company is currently undergoing a change in policy and thinking about implementing some serious child protection against pornography rules, Baidu got in trouble because of an adult.
Hong Kong star Edison Chen, dare I say, f***ed up when he sent his laptop to the shop for some parts being changed, but forgot to erase or copy and then delete all of the NSFW pictures and videos of himself and many other women he had stored on the hard drive. They got leaked and have been roaming the web ever since, no matter how many sites have been closed down because of them. Taking into account the Chinese censorship ongoing saga, Baidu couldn't have been spared, being a simple search engine and the photos being so much sought after.
A government-sponsored Internet watchdog spotted the images and then went on to say that certain key words and pages on the Baidu site "have become the platform for displaying and spreading these filthy pictures" and demanded that it apologize for its actions, as the International Herald Tribune reports.
"While other Beijing Internet companies have boycotted the spread of the racy photos, Baidu still hasn't implemented effective blocking and obscuring of the photos, and has become defensive and procrastinated, leading to the stagnation of a large amount of pornographic, filthy pictures," the statement issued on Monday reads. At the same time, the watchdog sang praise to other Chinese websites that did in fact try to stop the spread of the pornographic material, such as NetEase.com, Sina.com and Sohu.com.
Censorship is very big in China, but recently the government has taken a step back from the policy it said it would endorse, that of only keeping video sharing sites under their direct control. They now allow others to keep theirs, if they are in good relations with the authorities.