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Investors at Yahoo! have emphatically rejected plans for the company to formally oppose internet censorship.

The online firm has been criticised alongside Google and Microsoft in recent years for allowing foreign governments, particularly China, to heavily filter its search engine results.

Human rights campaigners have also protested against the companies' decision to deliver political opponents' emails held on its servers to Beijing.

But Yahoo!, like Google and Microsoft, says it is bound by the legal framework of the countries it operates in.

Google has also insisted that it is better serving Chinese people by providing as much information as possible rather than completely withdrawing.

At yesterday's annual shareholder meeting in Silicon Valley, California, 71 per cent of investors voted against proposals to formally oppose internet censorship, while just four per cent were in favour of the creation of an internal human rights committee.

Beijing's tight control over the internet has led commentators to dub the censorship the 'great firewall of China'.

Western media sources such as the BBC, Sky News and America's ABC are blocked on Chinese internet connections, while references to the Tiananmen Square massacre are completely filtered out.

Earlier this week Yahoo! Hong Kong suggested that the firm's photo-sharing service Flickr was taken offline in mainland China after authorities reacted to images of the 1989 protests being posted.