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Cleaning up swarming smut on mobile phones
By Wu Guangqiang |
January 14, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
MRS Liu, a sales manager in Beijing, had found in recent months that her mobile phone bills contained some extra "special" charges.
She later found out the money went to some unknown websites via auto charge from her bank account. Logging on these websites, to her horror and disgust, she discovered that they were swarming with pornographic stuff - including photos, videos and erotic text.
It turned out that her 12-year-old son had visited these webpages. In tears, the boy said a page popped up when he was browsing other sites and out of curiosity, he landed on it and fell for it. It accounted for the nosedive in his school grades and his torpor.
This is a classic case of how obscene mobile trash is intruding into the lives of hundreds of millions of mobile users, having a devastating impact on civil morality and harming adolescents in particular.
By September of 2009, the number of WAP users in China had exceeded 181 million and it is rising at an annual rate of 30 percent. Of the users, over 50 million are young people aged from 10 to 29.
The massive ownership of mobile phones underscores the extent and severity of the deluge of porn websites. According to a recent survey randomly conducted in the streets of Ningbao, Zhejiang Province, of 20 pupils interviewed, eight confessed that they had visited porn mobile websites. Of the eight, seven were junior middle schoolers and the other was a sixth grader. The Association of Juvenile Delinquency Prevention of China reports that teenager crime accounts for more than 70 percent of the total national criminal cases.
Juvenile delinquency
Cases involving minors aged 14 to 18 constitutes over 70 percent of total juvenile delinquency. Seventy percent of juvenile offenders committed a felony such as theft, robbery, rape, homicide and arson - after they became obsessed with erotic or violent content on mobile or online websites.
Breakneck development of 3G technology has made it super easy to start up a website and relatively hard to oversee its operation.
On the other hand, fat profits from running porn websites have fueled the proliferation of such sites.
Parents, teachers, educational experts, and most importantly, authorities, are faced with an unprecedented challenge: protection of teenagers against the pervasive and destructive scourge of pornography on mobile and online websites.
Some may argue that the nature of the mobile communication and the complexity of technology make censorship and supervision impossible.
This may be partly true. Technically, any individual may set up a new website instantly without a hassle, so after the closure of one, it's just a matter of a few minutes before another, even dozens or hundreds open.
Most lewd websites rent a server located overseas, making tracing difficult. Much of the dirty content is conveyed via devious routes. All this has resulted in the wild propagation of porn mobile sites.
But it is greed that spurs mobile-phone operators, SP value-added content providers and WAP websites form an "interest community."
An analogy can be drawn to illustrate the relationships among the three parties: mobile-phone operators are like a super highway, SP value-added content providers are vehicles running on the super highway and WAP websites are drug traffickers using the same highway.
Typically, the strategy of "crying wine and selling vinegar" is employed to spread pornography. A visit to any normal website may be linked to a porn site, which simply pops out, and every click on the porn site in turn links to an ad.
Avarice
In the end, the more clicks, the more income is generated. The biggest share of the cake goes to mobile phone operators. SPs and websites also rake in big bucks.
Avarice makes them lose their marbles. Over the past two years, despite a string of crackdowns on porn websites, rather than decline, the number has risen considerably.
The assertion that eradication of porn mobile websites is impossible is sheer nonsense.
It is found that a user of a Chinese mobile phone operator, say, China Netcom, can still visit such websites even in the US while a user of American mobile phone companies can't visit the same sites even in China.
It proves one thing: Such websites only target users of Chinese companies and it is China where the watchdog is sleeping.
There can be no more delay in sweeping garbage out of mobile phone screens. Immediate and more desperate measures must be taken.
The first and most important step should be legislation. Any party involved in production and dissemination of pornographic content should be sanctioned for criminal acts.
Mobile phone operators must be forced to pay heavy penalties for allowing smut to appear on the phone. Only by cutting off financial links, can offenders be stopped.
(The author is an English teacher in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.)
She later found out the money went to some unknown websites via auto charge from her bank account. Logging on these websites, to her horror and disgust, she discovered that they were swarming with pornographic stuff - including photos, videos and erotic text.
It turned out that her 12-year-old son had visited these webpages. In tears, the boy said a page popped up when he was browsing other sites and out of curiosity, he landed on it and fell for it. It accounted for the nosedive in his school grades and his torpor.
This is a classic case of how obscene mobile trash is intruding into the lives of hundreds of millions of mobile users, having a devastating impact on civil morality and harming adolescents in particular.
By September of 2009, the number of WAP users in China had exceeded 181 million and it is rising at an annual rate of 30 percent. Of the users, over 50 million are young people aged from 10 to 29.
The massive ownership of mobile phones underscores the extent and severity of the deluge of porn websites. According to a recent survey randomly conducted in the streets of Ningbao, Zhejiang Province, of 20 pupils interviewed, eight confessed that they had visited porn mobile websites. Of the eight, seven were junior middle schoolers and the other was a sixth grader. The Association of Juvenile Delinquency Prevention of China reports that teenager crime accounts for more than 70 percent of the total national criminal cases.
Juvenile delinquency
Cases involving minors aged 14 to 18 constitutes over 70 percent of total juvenile delinquency. Seventy percent of juvenile offenders committed a felony such as theft, robbery, rape, homicide and arson - after they became obsessed with erotic or violent content on mobile or online websites.
Breakneck development of 3G technology has made it super easy to start up a website and relatively hard to oversee its operation.
On the other hand, fat profits from running porn websites have fueled the proliferation of such sites.
Parents, teachers, educational experts, and most importantly, authorities, are faced with an unprecedented challenge: protection of teenagers against the pervasive and destructive scourge of pornography on mobile and online websites.
Some may argue that the nature of the mobile communication and the complexity of technology make censorship and supervision impossible.
This may be partly true. Technically, any individual may set up a new website instantly without a hassle, so after the closure of one, it's just a matter of a few minutes before another, even dozens or hundreds open.
Most lewd websites rent a server located overseas, making tracing difficult. Much of the dirty content is conveyed via devious routes. All this has resulted in the wild propagation of porn mobile sites.
But it is greed that spurs mobile-phone operators, SP value-added content providers and WAP websites form an "interest community."
An analogy can be drawn to illustrate the relationships among the three parties: mobile-phone operators are like a super highway, SP value-added content providers are vehicles running on the super highway and WAP websites are drug traffickers using the same highway.
Typically, the strategy of "crying wine and selling vinegar" is employed to spread pornography. A visit to any normal website may be linked to a porn site, which simply pops out, and every click on the porn site in turn links to an ad.
Avarice
In the end, the more clicks, the more income is generated. The biggest share of the cake goes to mobile phone operators. SPs and websites also rake in big bucks.
Avarice makes them lose their marbles. Over the past two years, despite a string of crackdowns on porn websites, rather than decline, the number has risen considerably.
The assertion that eradication of porn mobile websites is impossible is sheer nonsense.
It is found that a user of a Chinese mobile phone operator, say, China Netcom, can still visit such websites even in the US while a user of American mobile phone companies can't visit the same sites even in China.
It proves one thing: Such websites only target users of Chinese companies and it is China where the watchdog is sleeping.
There can be no more delay in sweeping garbage out of mobile phone screens. Immediate and more desperate measures must be taken.
The first and most important step should be legislation. Any party involved in production and dissemination of pornographic content should be sanctioned for criminal acts.
Mobile phone operators must be forced to pay heavy penalties for allowing smut to appear on the phone. Only by cutting off financial links, can offenders be stopped.
(The author is an English teacher in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.)
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