Text Message Breakup

China's seven million mobile phone users may face text message monitoring after the nation's three major telecom operators, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, announced in late January the blocking of text messages and possibly other services to subscribers over the transmission of "vulgar or indecent" text messages.

Text messages are to be filtered based on criteria for indecent Internet content established by the State Council last year, according to the Shanghai subsidiary of China Mobile, the world's biggest phone operator by market value. An automatic filtering system will be used to monitor messages through key word detection, and subscribers can also file complaints to the operator. In the ongoing campaign to eradicate Internet pornography, last year nine government departments listed 13 criteria that constituted indecent content on websites, including the description of sexual acts or human sexual organs, or any type of sexual innuendo. As a result of last year's porn crackdown, more than 15,000 pornographic websites have been shut down.