China Telecom, the country's major telecommunications operator,
vowed on Tuesday to tighten monitoring of service providers on its
Vnet.cn website after an online adult movie scandal.
Last week, a user surnamed Qiao brought a lawsuit against the
website's Hunan channel for providing "a great deal of"
pornographic movies, as reported by China Youth Daily on
June 21.
Immediately following the report, the channel's operator, Hunan
Telecom, terminated relations with the service provider, Hunan
Hexun Technology Co., and blacklisted the company, said a statement
from China Telecom.
Meanwhile, managers of the channel's operating center were
suspended, said the statement.
China Telecom said it would set up inspection teams inside the
company and in its provincial units, adopt a real-time monitoring
method and welcome public supervision.
Some local telecommunication firms ignored the responsibility of
censoring content provided by their partners, which was the main
cause of the incident, said Wang Yongzhen, a China Telecom
executive.
China Telecom would accelerate building of its information
security technology platform for Vnet.cn and adopt an automatic
identification and filtering system for online pornography, said
Yang Keke, general manager of the company's Internet and
value-added service department.
"But technically, it is quite difficult for us to accurately
identify pornographic pictures and videos, which are different from
text information," said Yang.
China lacked a law specifically defining online pornography, so
some service providers were able to take advantage of loopholes in
the rules and regulations, he added.
The government had stepped up anti-pornography efforts since
April in a campaign targeting illegal online activities such as
distributing pornographic material and organizing strip shows, to
purge the web of sexually explicit images, stories, and audio and
video clips.
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 reached 123 million in
mid-2006. About 15 percent, or 18 million, are under the age of
18.
(Xinhua News Agency?June 27, 2007)