Last week, a user sued the website's Hunan province channel for providing "a great deal of" pornographic movies, according to China Youth Daily. Hunan Telecom, the Hunan channel's operator, immediately terminated relations with and blacklisted the service provider, Hunan Hexun Technology Co., according to a statement from China Telecom. The statement also said that managers of the Hunan channel's operating center were suspended.
China Telecom announced plans to set up inspection teams inside the company and in its provincial units, adopt a real-time monitoring method and encourage public supervision of their efforts.
Yang Keke, general manager of China Telecom's Internet and value-added service department, said that the company would accelerate building of its information security technology platform for Vnet.cn and adopt an automatic identification and filtering system for online pornography.
"Technically, it is quite difficult for us to accurately identify pornographic pictures and videos, which are different from text information," Yang said.
This effort is the latest in an ongoing campaign started in April by the Chinese government to remove sexually explicit images, stories, and audio and video clips from the web. By mid-May, Chinese police had dealt with 244 cases and arrested 270 people in connection with online pornography.
The number of Internet users in China was estimated at 123 million in mid-2006. About 15 percent — or 18 million — are under the age of 18.