A new report by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) explores the growing demand for human-powered censorship in China. While the Party-state under Xi Jinping has increasingly restricted political expression, expanded its censorship apparatus, and experimented with leveraging AI for this goal, the bulk of censorship implementation remains a low-skilled, low-paid, and labor-intensive task performed by human workers in the private sector. As noted in the report, “The ICFP [Information Controls Fellowship Program] fellow analyzed job ads related to the censorship industry published over a seven-year period to understand the changes and current realities within the operations of information control practices by private sector actors in China.” Here are some of the key findings of the OTF report:
Between 2015 and 2022, companies in multiple business sectors in China posted more than 1.7 million censorship-related job ads, varying by different levels of censorship duties. The popularity of social media, especially video-based platforms, has led to dramatic increases in the demand for censorship labor.
In the Chinese censorship market, there are four major players: traditional content-based companies, such as news and social media companies; nontraditional censorship-requiring companies, who incorporate censorship into the responsibilities of other conventional roles (for example: a marketing professional required to censor promotional content, in addition to their primary tasks); human resource companies that offer outsourced censorship labor; and state-owned media agencies that offer their own suite of censorship services.
Censorship tasks were considered part-time duties at the start of the researched time period, but over the seven years quickly evolved into full-time professional work. Though essential to companies, censorship work is considered low-skill labor in China, and is characteristically labor-intensive and underpaid.
To lower the cost of operating a large censorship team, some companies choose to outsource their censorship work to human resource companies or their own subsidiary companies. The research uncovered over 3,000 human resource companies engaged in the outsourced censorship labor market.
The increasing demand for outsourced censorship labor has resulted in a prominent trend of geographical redistribution of censorship workforces, from more developed coastal areas, to developing inland regions. [Source]
In addition to OTF’s macro-level analysis, CDT and others have published more micro-level insights into China’s human censors. Last October, CDT translated excerpts from an interview by independent Chinese-language magazine Mangmang with a Gen Z censor, who described forbidden words, salary and working conditions, and those he viewed as the real culprits of censorship in China. In 2023, Teacher Li interviewed a former censor on his YouTube channel, and Global Voices translated excerpts of the interview. In 2022, CDT translated part of a report from Chinese digital media outlet Late Post that provided an in-depth analysis of the grueling work culture of Bilibli’s content moderation department, after a Bilibili content moderator died from a brain hemorrhage due to what many suspected was overwork. RFA has also profiled Eric Liu, a former analyst at CDT Chinese who was previously a content moderator for Weibo.
More recently, in January, RedNote (Xiaohongshu) posted multiple recruitment ads for content moderators in order to help adjust to the massive influx of American “TikTok refugees.” CDT reported on the regulatory conundrum this posed for the platform and highlighted instances of censorship. In 2022, CDT reported on a leaked internal document from Xiaohongshu revealing detailed censorship protocols instructing the company’s content moderators how to deal with “sudden incidents.”
Probing the implementation of censorship and other aspects of digital authoritarianism in China is an increasingly difficult task. Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, Emilie Szwajnoch, Alexander Trauth-Goik, Ausma Bernot, Fan Liang, and Ashley Poon explored the various challenges to this research in an article published on Friday in the Journal of Contemporary China: “Navigating Through The Fog: Reflexive Accounts on Researching China’s Digital Surveillance, Censorship, and Other Sensitive Topics.” In one section, Fan Liang lists censorship-related impediments to obtaining high-quality digital data: government-imposed restrictions on data access, industry (or platform-based) content moderation, and self-censorship on the part of survey respondents. Below, Fan provides more detail on platform-based restrictions on data access:
The second type of restriction comes from industry moderation, which affects areas ranging from social media platforms to survey firms. Many scholars collect social media data to analyze public opinion and policy processes. However, censorship and content moderation have been viewed as key tools used by platforms to monitor and regulate online content. More recently, major platforms have limited data access through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), making it increasingly difficult for scholars to download and collect large amounts of data from Chinese social media. While web scraping offers an alternative, this method may violate social media platforms’ policies and even China’s Data Security Law. Some scholars have developed solutions such as Weiboscope and WeChat scope, open-source platforms for collecting and visualizing data from Weibo and WeChat, respectively. Yet, these databases face challenges from both the platforms and China’s political environment. Moreover, industry moderation also involves the screening conducted by survey firms. For example, one of my research projects collected survey data to understand people’s attitudes toward official policies. My co-authors and I worked with a Chinese university and a large survey firm to conduct the online survey. In addition to the ethical board review at that university, our questionnaires were also screened by the survey firm and the Department of Industry and Information Technology. As a result, three questions were recommended for changes, as they focused on perceptions of trust in the central government. These questions were considered sensitive by the firm and the government, so my co-authors decided to remove them to launch the survey as soon as possible. This type of political screening has become a routine challenge for scholars conducting surveys in China, especially on politically sensitive topics. [Source]
Despite the growing censorship industry, Chinese and overseas internet users are constantly pursuing ways to circumvent online restrictions. Last week, on the occasion of World Day Against Cyber Censorship, Reporters Without Borders highlighted its ongoing work in developing Operation Collateral Freedom, a tool to help Chinese internet users access media outlets blocked by China’s Great Firewall:
Collateral Freedom is an initiative launched by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in 2015, which uses the method of mirroring websites of media outlets to guarantee their access in countries in which they are blocked by the censors. Under this initiative, RSF has already unblocked more than 150 media outlets’ websites worldwide, listed in its [GitHub] page except when security concerns require media outlets to remain discreet.
RSF currently enables 33 media outlets censored in China to overcome the “Great Firewall of China,” one of the most sophisticated systems of digital censorship and control in the world, which was strengthened when Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to power. Through the created mirror sites, Chinese citizens can now access independent sources of information as an alternative to the official propaganda, often touching on increasingly taboo topics in China, such as political news, social conflicts, and the human rights violations carried out by the Beijing regime. [Source]
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