Reuters journalists talked to former Chinese Internet censors
Reuters reporters interviewed four former Internet censors who were expected to refuse to call themselves and who worked for a certain time on Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter clone. Not surprisingly, the main task of the whole team was to filter posts for offensive or political content (it is very curious that the authors of the original text use the word apparatchiks to describe the functionaries of the Chinese Communist Party ).
Weibo has 500 million registered users and therefore the censors' staff must be kept quite impressive - only about 150 people per company in an office located half an hour from Beijing. At the same time, although there is no direct ban on women’s work, they avoid the “constant exposure to offensive materials” and all male employees. At the same time in the office at work is about 40 people who work 12 hours a day. The censors have a predominant age of 20 years, and many of them are graduates of local colleges. Their salary is about $ 490, which is comparable to the salary of a carpenter or a realtor.
Technically, their work looks approximately as follows - the system, prior to the publication of posts, pre-scans them for “suspicious”, in other words, those for which a person’s decision is required. Although there is an unconditional ban on such topics as, for example, the Falun Gong sect banned in China or Tiananmen Square events, the censors use a more “soft” practice for most other posts - the record remains visible only for its author and is blocked from being watched by the audience. However, nothing prevents blocking the possibility of commenting for the offending blogger, or even deleting his account in especially serious cases. Each employee has to read about 3000 posts per hour.
At the same time, the censor should keep abreast of the events taking place and be what is called a topic: when rumors about the alleged death of the former PRC Chairman Jiang Zemin began to spread in Weibo, many users who reported this did not use the words "frog" and “toad” (frog and toad) to designate the highest official in the state — as a result, these words also had to be entered into the automatic monitoring system and with the posts that contained them, the censors also had to work.
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Weibo has 500 million registered users and therefore the censors' staff must be kept quite impressive - only about 150 people per company in an office located half an hour from Beijing. At the same time, although there is no direct ban on women’s work, they avoid the “constant exposure to offensive materials” and all male employees. At the same time in the office at work is about 40 people who work 12 hours a day. The censors have a predominant age of 20 years, and many of them are graduates of local colleges. Their salary is about $ 490, which is comparable to the salary of a carpenter or a realtor.
Technically, their work looks approximately as follows - the system, prior to the publication of posts, pre-scans them for “suspicious”, in other words, those for which a person’s decision is required. Although there is an unconditional ban on such topics as, for example, the Falun Gong sect banned in China or Tiananmen Square events, the censors use a more “soft” practice for most other posts - the record remains visible only for its author and is blocked from being watched by the audience. However, nothing prevents blocking the possibility of commenting for the offending blogger, or even deleting his account in especially serious cases. Each employee has to read about 3000 posts per hour.
At the same time, the censor should keep abreast of the events taking place and be what is called a topic: when rumors about the alleged death of the former PRC Chairman Jiang Zemin began to spread in Weibo, many users who reported this did not use the words "frog" and “toad” (frog and toad) to designate the highest official in the state — as a result, these words also had to be entered into the automatic monitoring system and with the posts that contained them, the censors also had to work.
')
[ Source ]
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/284856/
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