It Takes A Lot Of People To Filter The Internet In China

from the employment-opportunities dept

The “Great Firewall” of China is quite well known. The fact that the country tries to block out plenty of websites and restrict what its citizens can do online is no secret. However, it seems that keeping Chinese internet users in check doesn’t just take a lot of technology (often from American firms), but plenty of people. A new article suggests that the country has over 30,000 internet police to monitor what’s going on — and that doesn’t appear to count security guards who literally look over peoples’ shoulders at internet cafes. Given the size of the population, that may not actually sound that large, but it is pretty significant — and it makes you wonder just how well that system scales as more and more Chinese citizens get online.


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Comments on “It Takes A Lot Of People To Filter The Internet In China”

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25 Comments
Max says:

How scale? Quite easy

In China is it possible that the police decides that the ones that browse in un-authorized sites get decapitated!

And they will do it for sure.

You know just last year there has been a video report of the shooting of a child (a girl) that at the end of the day has not reached her production target.

Scruffy Dan (user link) says:

Blogger

A friend of mine was in china, and realized that he could not access his blogger blog hosted on blogspot.com The great firewall blocks out the entire blogspot domain, but in their infinite wisdom the chiniese did not block blogger.com, so my firend was still able to post to his blog.

The chinese can’t tell each other how much censorship sucks, but they can tell the world

China Law Blog (user link) says:

Chinese internet filtering

There is far less internet filtering going on in China than generally believed. On top of this, the government really is not all that adept at it and the Chinese I know are quite adept at getting around it. I am not in any way condoning what is going on in China, but at the same time, I do think it is getting blown out of proportion.

China Law

Sean (user link) says:

Re: China...

I don’t see what you are trying to do here. Are you trying to say the numbers are similar to America’s numbers? Do you really think America has 3 Billion people in it? What the hell? Are you trying to say we have 3,000 internet police?

Vague anti-American comments from Americans is a freedom and all that noise, but it’s mostly just stupid. Although I give you some credit for trying to seem like an original thinker, that is so original!

Stuff says:

China Law Blog

“China Law Blog” wrote:
“There is far less internet filtering going on in China than generally believed.”

I for one go by what I see, and I see quite a lot. Curious to know who chinelawblog.com is I note that the registrar are these good folks: http://www.harrismoure.com. Nothing shameful in it, but I think you have a bit of a biased opinion seeing as how your are all about business flourishing in china.

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