Digging the yellow pages

Every six months or so, one or another government body launches a campaign to crack down on pornography and other types of 'unhealthy information'. Such crackdowns are usually called sao huang (扫黄) or 'sweep away the yellow', the color being a symbol for porn.

Some enterprising Chinese web master has started a site at Saohuang.cn that purports to be an aggregator of user complaints about immoral Chinese web pages. The complaints are presented in a way familiar to users of Digg, where users vote to determine what appears at the top of the home page. On Saohuang.cn however, they vote for web pages that contain 'offensive' content.

The site also contains serious sounding messages about protecting the good morals and healthy development of the youth, and links to online government services for reporting 'unhealthy' websites.

But there is something a little fishy about a system that pushes links to the filthiest content to the top of the page.