Voices

Why it's difficult to battle Web smut

By Bai Ping (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-15 11:50

How has China's latest drive against Web porn fared several months after it was launched?

If availability is the yardstick, the censors don't seem to have made much headway.

For example, despite repeated government warnings and condemnations, Google's Chinese portal is still providing links to obscene pictures, videos and articles.

On the day I checked, a Google search of "shoushou" - the nickname of a Beijing car model who was recently the victim of a sex photo and video scandal - turned up 22.7 million listings on how to download the videos and photos.

There are several reasons why cyber porn is still thriving despite the Internet crackdowns.

First, the emergence of the Web 2.0 community in China and explosion of user-generated and interactive content have provided new shelters for cyber smut.

Chinese bloggers totaling more than 50 million have found a free public sphere to express their views, a good thing for the country's democratization on the one hand; on the other, many of them have no qualms about posting sexually explicit content to attract eyeballs to their blogs.

Second, censoring content is labor-intensive and goes against the business logic of commercial websites locked in cutthroat competition for high volumes of Web traffic and advertising revenue. The relationship between commercial websites and Internet regulators is always difficult and the hide-and-seek game will continue.

Third, the cross promotion between newspapers and websites on scandal reporting also fuels the spread of pornography online. Sex scandals quickly explode onto the national scene, after newspapers report that videos, photos or journals are posted on the Internet and their stories are then in turn repackaged and played-up on the home pages of websites across the country.

Fourth, if an official is involved - such as the tobacco bureau chief whose purported sex diaries recently appeared online - cyber porn may spread even faster in the name of online vigilantism against corruption.

Web nannies might be relieved to learn that thanks to frantic efforts by collaborative websites to clean up, most download addresses quickly become dead or blocked after a scandal breaks. But experienced users can easily "scale the wall" to access a blocked porn site or page that is cached in computers overseas.

One of the most popular and efficient bypass methods is the use of a Web proxy. To access a blocked site, users can log on to a foreign proxy server, which in turn logs on to the blocked site, thus fooling the site-blocking filter.

Chinese laws forbid publishing or redistributing pornography, but not what people view. So if an Internet-savvy voyeur is determined to look for pornography online, he'll surely find it.

Now that tight government control with reluctant self-censorship by websites has proved insufficient to deter the rise of cyber porn, it's probably time to rethink how to deal with websites hosting crude and vulgar web content.

It's obvious that although obscene spam messages do get sent around, nowadays most users actually have to go looking for porn on the web.

So the ultimate solution is probably for netizens themselves, especially those young Internet users who account for 70 percent of China's Internet population, to understand more about pornography.

Psychological counseling services are still new to Chinese universities and there is no such thing as a support group for young people struggling with pornography. Paternalistic educators may not believe in an open approach allowing young people to discuss the reasons and the consequences of viewing pornography, and allowing them to decide for themselves whether or not to change their behavior, but this would probably be the most effective solution.

One may expect more sex scandals with obscene photos or videos to occur in the future.

And don't think people have given up voyeurism when there is none. The by-passers may just be enjoying themselves quietly.