The Chinese government has turned its sights on Yahoo, ordering the company to remove pornographic content from a photo-sharing site that it was hosting.

The Internet Society of China government watchdog accused Yahoo of violating social morals with the site.

Yahoo obtained a 40 percent stake in Alibaba Group in 2005 in return for control over Yahoo China - partly to avoid just this sort of problem.

A spokesman for Alibaba Group told the IDG News Service  that the photosharing site, Yahoo Space, was closed a week ago. The site allowed users to share photo albums with attached blogs.

China has been going great guns in closing down websites that it deems unacceptable. The last high-profile offender was Google, which has since changed the algorithm on its local search engine to block offending results.