Yahoo’s Chinese portal, known as Yahoo China, offers a social-networking service called Yahoo Space that includes an option to add a photo gallery. Yahoo closed the service last month, but now the Chinese government has targeted it in an ongoing war on porn that has included nationwide edicts that all citizens install porn-blocking software on their computers.
In this case, the Internet Society of China — a government-sponsored watchdog group — has accused Yahoo China and other local websites of violating “social morals” by allowing adult content to show up on their domains.
Yahoo had hoped to avoid this kind of trouble by turning over majority control of Yahoo China to a local company called the Alibaba Group.
The draconian move by the Chinese government has chilled its relationship with the online giant, which recently entered into an agreement with Microsoft’s adult-friendly search-engine Bing. Microsoft’s upstart search-engine will replace Yahoo search sometime next year, but users in China might not get the full benefit of Bing because Yahoo is abandoning their shores.
Yahoo’s Rose Tsou said that the company’s latest ad campaign, titled “It’s You,” won’t run in China.
The Internet Society of China also led the charge to force Google’s China to remove adult results from its Google.cn search results.
