People’s Daily reports:

China will shut down pornographic websites and blogs in a nine-month nationwide campaign, said the Ministry of Public Security.

The campaign focusing on clearing porn pictures, articles and videos will last until September, according to the ministry.

These campaigns go on all the time, so it’s hardly news. What’s interesting is how the PSB intends to do it:

According to Beijing Youth Daily, a total of 60,000 websites have been registered to provide audio and visual programs in China. The authority will give special attention to these websites, blogs, videos, point-to-point services, which have become a main channel of pornographic information distribution.

… According to the campaign’s plan, Internet search engines are asked to filter pornography. Advertisements of sexual tools and porn websites will be banned.

In addition, editors of bulletin board system (BBS), online forums and chatrooms will be asked to register their real names for Internet administration.

Rather than identifying and investigating pornographers, the PSB will hold the companies that help people find it (search engines), the sites that promote and/or link to it (BBSs, forums, chatrooms), and the platforms that serve it (sites, blogs, video sites, P2P) responsible.

Policing the production of pornography is impossible. It’s much easier go after the distribution channels. The problem with targeting the internet as a distribution channel is that there’s a lot of user-driven content that has to be reviewed. It’s easy enough to filter blog and BBS comments for obvious spambot references to pornography, but evaluating the content from a community of active users is no easy task. Posts have to be read, videos have to be watched, P2P links checked, podcasts listened to. It requires a substantial amount of time that ultimately costs money.

Putting the onus on the operators of user-driven content sites is a quick and cheap means of enforcement. By being made responsible for other people’s speech (in whatever form), the operators become auxiliary policemen out of a sense of self-preservation. That this is coming from the PSB, as opposed to the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) or the Ministry of Information Industries (MII), is another interesting wrinkle.

And who knows what constitutes pornography? I don’t know what the legal definition of it is in China. I can only assume that prurience is not considered a socially harmonious virtue.

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