The voting took place at Yahoo!'s annual general meeting where the proposal to adopt the censorship opposition policy garnered just 15 per cent support. The creation of a human rights committee fared even worse, generating support from just four per cent of shareholders.
Human Rights Watch accused the world's three major search engines - Google, Yahoo! and MSN - of "carrying out censorship for the Chinese Government" last year. Google and Yahoo! practice the act of delisting sites from search results in China and, when looking for new information, the search engines disregard these websites.
The search engines take the view that providing some information is better than providing no information at all to the 140 million internet users in China.
While shareholders voted to reject censorship opposition, Beijing reportedly has blocked the Yahoo!-owned photo sharing site Flickr. Yahoo!'s Hong Kong unit said that the website had not shown photos to users in mainland China since last week.
Speaking to Reuters, a representative from Yahoo! Hong Kong confirmed the issue:
"It is our understanding that Flickr users in China are not able to see images on Flickr, and we have confirmed that this is not a technical issue on our end. It appears that the Chinese government is restricting access to Flickr, although we have not received confirmation from them."
It is thought that the Chinese government started restricting access to the site as the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre loomed and images of the event were being uploaded. The ruling Communist party banned all references to the massacre in all state media, literature and the internet.
On the other hand Flickr has just gone multilingual, adding support for a variety of languages - including Chinese.
