CHINA — The Chinese government announced this week that it has begun a new crackdown on internet porn, an effort that will target live feeds as well as sites offering sexually explicit pictures, videos, audio clips and stories, according to the government-operated Xinhua News Agency.“The boom of pornographic content on the internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China’s young minds,” deputy public security minister Zhang Xinfeng said Thursday, according to the Associated Press (AP).

Chinese police also announced Friday that two webmasters had been sentenced to four years in prison, and a third received a one-year sentence for distributing pornographic videos and other sexually explicit materials, sentences that stemmed from arrests made last year.

At Thursday’s news conference, Zhang said that the government’s new campaign will also be aimed at illicit online lotteries, fraud, and “content that spreads rumors and is of a slanderous nature.”

While China’s communist government encourages web use for educational, communications, and business applications, it goes to great lengths to control political speech and sexually explicit content.

Xinhua reported this week that “China has roughly 123 million internet users, most of whom are young people,” adding that the “government believes they need to be protected from negative online influences.”

Zhang asserted, however, that China’s current online problems – being named by Symantec as the second largest source (by country) of “malicious activity” online, for instance – are due to foreign filth and domestic permissiveness.

“The inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control are to blame for the existing problems in China’s cyberspace,” said Zhang, according to the AP.

According to Xinhua, the Beijing Reformatory for Juvenile Delinquents claims that over a third of its detainees were “influenced” by violent online video games or sexually explicit websites when they committed crimes like theft and sexual assault.