Anti-porn arrests hit offshore website
Police detain 2,148 people in the biggest crackdown on illegal internet adult content
Mainland police have detained more than 2,100 suspects in the biggest crackdown against pornography in terms of the number of arrests, Beijing municipal police said yesterday.
Beijing police said 2,148 people were detained during a three-month operation in the first half of the year targeting MM House, a Chinese language porn site registered in the US.
A probe by an internet police unit at the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau found that the site, founded in January 2009, featured 11 themes with more than eight million files, of which 90 per cent were pornographic.
Legal Daily, quoting Zheng Hao, a deputy head of a unit overseeing internet security at Beijing police, reported that 530 of the detainees would face criminal charges while the remainder would be fined or let off with a warning.
Zheng said a crackdown on adult content providers in the past several years on the mainland had driven most of them overseas, where they operated from servers registered in foreign countries with help from webmasters on the mainland.
"The reason we launched the clampdown on pornography sites such as MM House is because they're mostly targeting mainland clients with help from local webmasters," he added.
Zheng said an overwhelming majority of sign-ups for MM House were based in the mainland, with some as young as 14.