Chinese mobile providers will monitor text messages in the country for “illegal or unhealthy content” and suspend service when a customer inadvertently sends up a red flag, according to a report in The New York Times.
Companies like China Mobile will turn the potentially offending messages over to the authorities to be reviewed. If the customer is cleared of any wrongdoing, his or her service will be restored, but it doesn’t look like the mobile providers or authorities are going out of their way to clearly define what constitutes an offense.
Police will provide words to scan for to catch potential criminals in the name of fighting pornography. We reported a couple of weeks ago that more than 5,000 arrests were made on pornography charges in 2009 to prevent the scourge from “overwhelming the country’s Internet and threatening the emotional health of children.”
We’re not sure which words are on the list, but the Times quotes Beijing University telecommunications professor Kan Kaili who claims that “they are doing wide-ranging checks, checking anything and everything, even if it is between a husband and wife.”
Married couples? That could be a problem for the pornography flags, people. This seems to be par for the course if we’re getting the full story here in the West, though — Google has threatened to leave the country if China doesn’t make an effort to improve freedom of speech.
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