By Li Shuang

China Mobile's Beijing branch specified the three prerequisites that qualify an SMS to be obscene, adding that those who send said messages will have their service terminated immediately, but doubts about the anti-porn SMS campaign remain.

The three parameters include those who: spam a great many phones with bawdy messages, have texts reported as spam by other users and are judged as obscene by the proper authorities, according to Luo Ling, spokesperson for China Mobile Beijing.

China Mobile, the world's biggest cellphone operator, along with China Telecom and China Unicom, is helping the Chinese authorities with a campaign to crackdown on "illegal SMSs."

Users in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will have their SMS services cut off if they are found to have distributed pornographic content via phone.

The three standards may calm users who fear their phones might be cut off upon sending a few naughty SMSs to their friends. "At least China Mobile tries to draw some boundaries, which China Telecom and China Unicom fail to do," one user in an online forum commented.

However, the public continues to question the legitimacy of the campaign, which is seen by many as an invasion of users' privacy.

"It is the right of an adult to enjoy pornography. It is never a good idea to bring the state into moral issues," Li Yinhe, a top sexologist based in Beijing, told the Global Times.

China Mobile told the Beijing News on Tuesday that pornographic content includes, "texts describing or implying sexual behavior" and "descriptions of human genitalia." Han Han, a Shanghai based writer and blogger, wrote on his blog: "Who is to judge what content is implying sexual behavior? … I will start sending my friends all kinds of messages just to test the boundaries."

Experts also accused China Mobile of breaching contract with its consumers.

"All social issues aside, all the cellphone service providers need to resign their contracts with millions of users. I did not know my SMS function might be suspended when I bought their SIM cards and signed up for their service," Pan Suiming, a sexologist at Renmin University, told the Global Times.

China Mobile failed to confirm whether the execution of the policy would be a keyword filtering system or whether messages in English or pinyin would be monitored.