A Peep at Pornography Web in China

Abstract

We seek to gain improved insight into the pornography web in China when the authorities step up the anti-pornography campaigns as part of China’s Internet regulation. Based on our collected snapshots of 92950 pornographic web pages from 1826 pornographic sites over the course of 10 months, we measured the users’ visiting behavior in different time scale, and the distribution of porn web sites in quantity and geography. Our findings indicate the clampdown on pornography web made a difference but never eradication and the pornography web sites’ geographic distribution is positively correlated with regional economic level. We also find that there exists “Pareto principle” in both online porn visit times of a user and the number of visits to a porn site, and both the ranked number of visits of a user and number of user under a certain online porn visiting times obey the power law. We hope our work could shed some light on the present and future of pornography web in China.