Chinese search engine giant Baidu has reportedly been ordered by the authorities to check for obscene content after pornographic files were found on its online storage service.
According to the report from the official Xinhua news service on Sunday, Beijing’s cultural administrative authorities have issued a warning, after an investigation that found some of the Baidu cloud accounts hosted obscene and pornographic content, citing a statement by Beijing’s anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications office.
The reports claim that the search engine giant has been warned against inefficient supervision of its storage service and urged to “promptly delete all files in question, shut down accounts uploading such content and present a report on its clean-up effort.”
Baidu refused to comment on the report when contacted.
The anti-pornography campaign dubbed “Cleaning the Web 2014” initiated by the Chinese authorities in April, targets websites, online advertisements, forum posts as well as smart-phone applications for pornographic and improper content. The campaign is scheduled to end in November this year.
As per official figures released in June, the campaign has led to shutdown of 1,222 websites and deletion of about 2,200 pieces of text containing pornographic information as of yet.
In May, Beijing authorities fined Internet firm Sina Corp with 5.1 million yuan for allowing “unhealthy and indecent content” on its online reading channel and on its main website.
