Chinese authorities have long passed on much of the work of online censorship enforcement to domestic tech companies: in 2013, for example, Reuters published an interview with four former in-house content monitors at Sina Weibo. Firms have since responded to mounting political pressures with expanded internal censorship workforces, sometimes augmented with volunteer recruits. At The New York Times this week, Li Yuan described the growth of outsourced censorship services. While efforts to reliably automate the process face stubborn challenges in frequently coded or allusive political references, human workers require education about political sensitivities which most have never encountered before.

"We’re the Foxconn in the data industry," said Mr. Yang, comparing his firm to the biggest contract manufacturer that makes iPhones and other products for Apple.

[…] New hires start with weeklong "theory" training, during which senior employees teach them the sensitive information that they didn’t know before.

"My office is next to the big training room," Mr. Yang said. "I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’"

"They didn’t know things like June 4," he added, referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. "They really didn’t know."

[…] Workers are briefed at the beginning of their shift on the newest censoring instructions sent by clients, which the clients themselves receive from government censors. Workers then must answer about 10 questions designed to test their memory. The results of the exam affect the workers’ pay.

[…] According to Beyondsoft’s website, its content monitoring service, called Rainbow Shield, has compiled over 100,000 basic sensitive words and over three million derivative words. Politically sensitive words make up one-third of the total, followed by words related to pornography, prostitution, gambling and knives. [Source]