Did Your Favorite Chinese Website Just Get Shut Down? Probably Because It Wasn’t Hosting Porn

Just as China opens a state-owned gay bar with the intent of better educating the LGBT community about HIV/AIDS, officials there have ordered at least 10 gay websites offline. Because gay chatting is illegal.

It’s unclear what criteria Chinese officials used in ordered web hosts to close the accounts of certain websites — like whether they featured bad design or just those annoying Twitter toolbars at the bottom of their pages — but site publishers are being told there was too great a risk their pages contained morally objectionable content, like pornography. China’s People’s Daily reports:

More than 10 gay websites in China have been recently forced to close or had their accounts deleted by their server hosting companies, an NGO said yesterday.

“Some of the hosting service providers even told us that gay chatting was illegal,” said Geng Le, the webmaster of a gay website in Beijing.

The Chinese Association of HIV/AIDS NGOs, which was founded by 165 NGOs in China, made the statement on Wednesday. It also said they would provide free legal aid to those webmasters.

[…] A webmaster surnamed Chen, whose gay website in Beijing was been closed by a web hosting company, said the company had told him gay websites might hold immoral information and pornographic literature.

“I would bet that most gay websites are more ‘clean and healthy’ than websites not closed by the government,” he said.

“As a gay webmaster, we are more careful about all the information on the website, because we want to remove the prejudice on the gay group. We want to let them know we are healthy.”

Yesterday was his website’s 10th anniversary. He said he originally planned to celebrate the day. But now, he just worries about how long the website can exist.

According to Geng, some webmasters of gay websites have been forced to host their websites on foreign servers.

Indeed, there’s a nationwide web porn crackdown in China that’s going after more than just gay websites. Even mobile sites are being targeted. But we tend to believe this webmaster Chen about gay website publishers being smart enough to know not to put porn on their pages. Not even that boring, pixelated crap.