Banning By Keyword?

from the interesting-strategy dept

It's well known that China blocks out certain websites, but their latest move to stop people from accessing content the government considers harmful is to have certain local search engines ban keywords. Apparently, popular Chinese search engine Baidu has a list of about 40,000 banned keywords. It's not entirely clear what happens if someone does search on a banned keyword (0 search results? told you've searched on banned words? immediately told to report to the local prison?), but with so many banned keywords there must be an awful lot of collateral damage in terms of perfectly reasonable websites that can't be found. Of course, it's been clear for a while that the Chinese government really isn't too concerned with "false positives" in their efforts to ban anything they consider to be "harmful" online.