China orders amateur sex videos scrubbed from social media, threatens to punish offenders

Mainland China’s top anti-pornography office on Thursday announced its latest mission: a campaign to remove amateur sex videos from domestic social media.

Long intolerant of obscenity online, Beijing authorities are now trying to keep the nation’s cyberspace clean at a time when it has become easier for people to use mobile phones to make sex videos and use social media and cloud storage to share such content.

In July, a sex video taken with a mobile phone inside a fitting room of the clothing retailer Uniqlo in Beijing spread quickly in China’s social media. Police have detained four people on suspicion of spreading the obscene content.

On Wednesday, sexual scenes were somehow aired on a giant display screen at a shopping mall in Lishui city in the eastern province of Zhejiang, and clips of the footage spread online, prompting police to investigate who was spreading the content, according to media reports.

Also on Wednesday, a home-made video clip of sexual acts in Chengdu city in the southern province of Sichuan spread on China’s Twitter-like Weibo. The police have detained one suspect on suspicion of spreading the video, local authorities said.

Citing these three incidents, the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications said it was demanding government authorities at all levels take immediate action whenever such cases arose, and to “resolutely” punish those who uploaded and hosted the content.