Hashtags Now Linking in Twitter Greater Emphasis Put on Twitter Search
The Chinese New Year will begin on January 26th, and for some of the most prominent Internet companies in China, it's not shaping up to be a good one. Government officials are going after Google, Baidu, and Sina for distributing "vulgar" content.
The China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre put out a list today identifying sites that in some way offend its sensibilities. Far from being straightforward providers of pornography, most of the organizations just offer search functions or photo-sharing capabilities.

As reported by Tania Branigan, a Chinese official explained, "Some websites have exploited loopholes in laws and regulations. They have used all kinds of ways to distribute content that is low-class, crude and even vulgar, gravely damaging mores on the internet."
Neither the official nor the CIIIRC went on to make any threats, but it'll be hard for the affected companies to interpret this development as anything but bad. If they censor content, they're likely to lose users. If they don't censor anything, they risk being hit by outages and blocks.
At least one American corporation with a Chinese arm may be sitting pretty, though, as the CIIIRC didn't identify Yahoo as a troublemaker.
Hashtags Now Linking in Twitter
4 Comments
I think China's censorship
I think China's censorship related to anything that it considers vulgar content is much worse than how it censors criticism of its government because it's messing up people's personal freedoms in addition to political
Baidu's reputation is not so
Baidu's reputation is not so well in China even thought i got more then 60% search engine market share in China.
Google needs to pay royalty
Google needs to pay royalty fees to shut them up...
Yeah well Google is in no
Yeah well Google is in no other position now but to jump when the Chinese government tells it to after caving in to earlier demands...
Shame on them
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