BEIJING — China’s porn cops have slapped a notice on search engine giant Baidu.com, to clean its Cloud of porn — or else.
The country's cultural administrative authorities reportedly found “obscene” and porn content on the online storage service after being tipped off by citizens as part of its “Cleaning the Web 2014” that began last November.
Beijing's anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications office said Baidu has already been warned about it’s nonchalant supervision of its cloud and was told to "promptly delete all files in question, shut down accounts uploading such content and present a report on its clean-up effort."
The warning came despite Baidu’s post last April that said "In order to cleanse cyber environment, Baidu Cloud thoroughly bans the sharing of pornographic content... Users are welcome to report improper resources."
In what appears to be a move to comply, the Xinhua new agency reported that a new anti-porn statement has emerged on the company’s forum stating that it’s now checking users’ shared files for questionable content.
Since it began, the campaign has led to the shutdown of 1,222 websites and deletion of about 2,200 pieces of text containing porn, according to official figures released in June.
Two other Chinese tech giants, portal Sina.com, and VOD provider Qvod were also recently put on notice by authorities and threatened to have their licenses revoked if they didn’t clean up their acts.
The crackdown is set to end November.