New research from an Open Technology Fund Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) fellow—who is remaining anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the research—illustrates how censorship in China has evolved into a sizable and complex industry comprising an interconnected web of actors and technological systems.
While the many technologically advanced forms of automated censorship are an important part of the Chinese Communist Party’s information control apparatus, censorship in China also requires a huge amount of human labor. The need for ongoing and effective information control among companies operating within China’s legal landscape, which has criminalized political expression, has led to an increased demand for censorship labor. Despite the significant role that information control workers play in mitigating risk for companies publishing online content, censorship work is often framed in online censorship-related job ads as low-skill labor and is characteristically underpaid and labor-intensive.
The delegation of information control responsibilities to private sector actors by the government has also created an enabling environment for new players in the industry to emerge and strengthen the state’s capacity to carry out censorship. Furthermore, the increased demand for outsourced censorship labor among private sector actors has led to marked shifts in censorship market dynamics.
The ICFP 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. In the report (linked below), the fellow details the critical yet understudied world of this human-powered censorship industry and the market dynamics of Chinese censorship.
The findings bring to light the intersectional relevance of Chinese censorship operations to multiple socio-political, economic, and technological fields of study, as well as its relevance to practitioners across diverse sectors working in the pursuit of internet freedom.
Key Findings
- Arbitrary and harsh punishments on non-compliant content have pressured private companies to strengthen their internal censorship capacities.
- People play a significant role in carrying out “content risk control” work, in spite of technological developments in automated censorship.
- 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.
Read the Full Report
Data Visualization of the Chinese Censorship Job Landscape, 2015-2022
About the program: OTF’s Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) supports examination into how governments in countries, regions, or areas of OTF’s core focus are restricting the free flow of information, impeding access to the open internet, and implementing censorship mechanisms, thereby threatening the ability of global citizens to exercise basic human rights and democracy. The program supports fellows to work within host organizations that are established centers of expertise by offering competitively paid fellowships for three, six, nine, or twelve months in duration.