China Accuses Google of Spreading Lewd Content

June 26, 2009 · Filed Under News · Comment

The Chinese government charged search giant Google Inc of spreading pornography after users in China were temporarily unable to access the main site and some of its related services.

On Thursday, the spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry Qin Gang announced that the English version of Google’s main website had been found to contain lewd and vulgar content. He also added that representatives of Google in China had been summoned by the authorities and asked to remove all inappropriate content that are in serious violation of Chinese laws.

In response to the accusation, Google representatives said that it was doing all it can to check the spread of lewd content from its links in China. The Mountainview, California-based search engine giant also said that the company would investigate the outage that prevented many users in China from accessing the U.S site of google.com, its China-based site google.cn as well as its e-mail service, Gmail.

China has the world’s largest number of Internet users which according to an estimate stands at 298 million. The communist government of China has one of the strictest web-filtering networks in place and frequently blocks the Chinese people’s access to foreign sites on charges of dissension, anti-national activities or pornography.

Tags: China control of internet, Google, google outage