Internet giant Baidu flagged in China porn crackdown

China's search engine giant Baidu has been urged to clean up improper content after its online storage service was found to have pornographic files.

The warning came after investigations by Beijing's cultural administrative authorities confirmed public tip-offs that some accounts on Baidu Cloud (pan.baidu.com) contained obscene and pornographic content, said a statement released Sunday by Beijing's anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications office.

According to the office, the company has been warned against slack supervision of its storage service and urged to "promptly delete all files in question, shut down accounts uploading such content and present a report on its clean-up effort."

Calls to Baidu went unanswered, but a red-letter anti-pornography slogan at pan.baidu.com led to a post at its forum saying that the company had started to check users' shared files for questionable content.

"In order to cleanse cyber environment, Baidu Cloud thoroughly bans the sharing of pornographic content... Users are welcome to report improper resources," said the post, dated April -- the month when China's high-profile crackdown on online pornography began.

The "Cleaning the Web 2014" campaign, scheduled to end in November, targets websites, online advertisements, forum posts as well as smart-phone applications.

It led to the shutdown of 1,222 websites and deletion of about 2,200 pieces of text containing pornographic information, according to official figures released in June.

Previously, leading portal website Sina.com and online video service provider Qvod were both threatened by authorities with punishments including license revoking for spreading pornographic information.