Chinese Search Engine Censured

News of the scandal has dominated Hong Kong headlines for several weeks.

China keeps tighter watch over the Internet than semiautonomous Hong Kong, however, and the government-sponsored Beijing Association of Online Media said in a statement on its Web site Tuesday that Baidu helped spread the racy pictures in the mainland.

The group said certain key word searches and certain pages on the Baidu site ''have become the platform for displaying and spreading these filthy pictures.'' The association demanded that the Web site apologize.

''While other Beijing Internet companies have boycotted the spread of the racy photos, Baidu still hasn't implemented effective blocking and obscuring of the photos and has become defensive and procrastinated, leading to the stagnation of a large amount of pornographic, filthy pictures,'' the watchdog said in the statement, which was dated Monday.

China bans pornography, although the government's Internet police struggle to block pornographic Web sites based abroad. The government recently released new rules giving it more control over Internet videos and video-sharing Web sites.

The government regularly censors and restricts access to content it considers subversive or politically sensitive, and Chinese Web sites often hire their own censors to screen for potentially problematic content.

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