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Their job: Clean up the Internet
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WEARING heavy make-up and a black leather hair band, a young woman closes her eyes and caresses the tip of a black shoe with her tongue.
This photo, with its overt sexual connotation, was posted on Taobao.com, China’s largest online shopping website, to promote the popularity of a cyber shoe shop. But it didn’t stay there long. Monitors at Alibaba Group, Taobao’s parent, quickly removed it.
Internet censors, or content monitors, are commonly employed by Chinese Internet companies to monitor content for anything of an obscene nature.
Their job is to trawl through all the material posted on websites looking for anything that might be classified as pornographic, violence or an outrage to social norms.
“We don’t just censor things that are pornographic, but also material that is vulgar,” says Peter Hu, head of public relations for Alibaba’s general security department.
Last year, Baidu, Tencent and eight other major Internet companies formed what they called the Internet Security Alliance. They announced they would recruit a “chief pornography censor specialist” at the somewhat princely salary of 200,000 yuan (US$32,204) a year.
In a week of the job notice being posted on the Weibo social networking platform, 4,000 people applied.
Alibaba specialists have built a pornographic sample library for years. A filtration system screens online material first, and then a specialist has to review subject matter that the computer filters out as suspect.
“A specialist essentially has to be familiar with pornography in all its different formats,” says Frank Yang, a censor specialist at Taobao.
At the end of every day, the specialists load up everything they have learned in the last 24 hours to update the database.
One recent addition was a new service offering virtual lovers. For 20 yuan (US$3.22), buyers could “purchase” a girlfriend or boyfriend who would chat with them for 24 hours via text messages or by instant messaging tools such as WeChat, Weibo or QQ. The virtual lovers came in a variety of types to fit every fantasy.
The service has since disappeared.
“We use big data analysis,” says Tom Bao, a manager in the information security department of Aliyun, a unit of Alibaba. “When public opinion toward some material is overwhelming outrage, we look into it. The virtual lover offended normal public morality.”
Although the computer is invaluable, it can’t make fine-line judgments.
“There is obscene content that a computer can’t recognize, especially sexual innuendo,” Yang says. “For that, specialists need to intervene.
“After doing this job for several years, the censors get a pretty solid feel of what to look for. They can tell just a few minutes into a video, for example, whether it will contain pornographic scenes,” he adds.
It’s a battle of wits.
“Offenders keep inventing new ways to avoid censorship, and we keep digging and improving our database,” says Hu, Alibaba’s PR head for general security department.
The company also relies on more than 2,000 online volunteers who notify the censors if they come across pornography.
Yang says he has had to deal with some pretty disgusting images and messages posted online, but he doesn’t get rattled.
“For me, it’s just a job,” he says. “Not that we are numb to watching erotica, but work is work. As a specialist, we view porn as an irregularity and think about the algorithm to put it in our database.”
He did admit that staff sometimes resort to somewhat crude humor to relieve the stress of the job, but that is not the norm.
Most of the censoring specialists at Alibaba are men, Bao says. Women generally find the work too distasteful.
Lillian Wu, 25, just resigned from her job as a porn censor at an Internet company in Beijing. Until the day she resigned, her boyfriend, parents and all her friends didn’t know her real job.
“I just told them I was a website editor,” she says.
Wu says on her first day at work, she was confronted with the computer image of a man holding his penis in a porno film.
“It made me gasp,” she says. “But later on, I became inured and such images just didn’t faze me anymore. But I didn’t like feeling so numbed.”
Wu says she left her job because it was work she couldn’t share with family or friends. And the experience has adversely affected her relationships with male friends.
However, Yang looks at the job more stoically.
“We are cleaning up websites so they don’t damage society, especially teenagers,” he says. “It’s really harmful to see porno online videos involving young people.”
It’s sensitive indeed. Youku Tudou, China’s biggest video site, declined to be interviewed by Shanghai Daily on this subject, and the Shanghai Public Security Bureau also didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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