China's top Internet search engine censured for spreading racy photos

Min Lee, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HONG KONG - China's top Internet search engine has been censured for allegedly helping spread sexually explicit photos.

The government-sponsored watchdog group is demanding both action and an apology from Baidu.com over the online availability of the photos, which feature several Hong Kong celebrities.

The photos appear to show actor Edison Chen and several female stars performing sex acts or in sexually suggestive poses.

They are widely available in Hong Kong, where the scandal has dominated the headlines for several weeks.

The watchdog group, called the Beijing Association of Online Media, praised other Chinese sites such as NetEase.com, Sina.com and Sohu.com for urging their users not to spread the photos.

Baidu.com says it has no immediate comment.

China keeps tighter watch over the Internet than semi-autonomous Hong Kong.

The group said certain key word searches and certain pages on the Baidu site "have become the platform for displaying and spreading these filthy pictures."

The association demanded that the website apologize.

"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 association said its statement, dated Monday.

China bans pornography, although the government's Internet police struggle to block pornographic websites based abroad. The government recently released new rules giving it more control over Internet videos and video-sharing websites.

The government regularly censors and restricts access to content it considers subversive or politically sensitive, and Chinese websites often hire their own censors to screen for potentially problematic content.

China's online population has soared to 210 million people. The country could surpass the United States this year to become host to the world's biggest online community, the official China Internet Network Information Centre said last month.

© The Canadian Press, 2008