China's internet censorship practices is pretty well known, but no one has really figured out just how many people they have working in their censorship department, until now.



According to Beijing News, the number of "internet opinion analysts" working for the government is around two million. Their job is to troll social media sites like Weibo for troubling entries, which are then indexed and collated before being passed on to a presumably smaller group of actual decision-makers. Here's BBC's translation of the Beijing News article:
[Analysts] strictly to gather and analyse public opinions on microblog sites and compile reports for decision-makers. ... [An analyst] sits in front of a PC every day, and opening up an application, he types in key words which are specified by clients. He then monitors negative opinions related to the clients, and gathers (them) and compile reports and send them to the clients.
While it might seem excessive, this is China we're referring to here. The Weibo users alone equals to about 500 million, with around 100 million messages daily. So you'll definitely need a lot of eyes to scan through all that crap. Here's hoping they don't decide to outsource their skills in the near future.

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