China Looks To Build Human Firewall With Fun, Prizes

from the snitching-pays dept

Fri, Feb 13th 2009 3:55pm — Carlo Longino

China's experiment with crowdsourcing internet propaganda -- in which it reportedly pays people 50 cents for each positive post they make about the government or its policies -- must be going well. The government there is now looking to engage citizens' help in purging the internet of porn and other undesirable content by giving people rewards for reporting porn sites. This follows the government's push to get search engines to try and prevent people in China from accessing porn by threatening them with punishment if they don't. While China's "Great Firewall" does manage to block a lot of content, it certainly isn't foolproof. And if people can find ways around it to discuss contaminated milk, one has to imagine that this latest hurdle won't prove too difficult for porn fans to navigate.

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Filed Under: bureaucracy, censorship, china, great firewall, propaganda

7 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 13 Feb 2009 @ 5:22pm

How much does the citizen recieve for not talking about contaminated milk ?
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Feb 2009 @ 7:31pm

Re:
Nothing, but if they say they love contaminated milk and drink it all the time, then they get prizes.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Feb 2009 @ 8:18pm

What is the definition of porn in China ? Half of all accessible porn, movies, software, and basically any other digital content you can think of is being served from Chines servers. Maybe more.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Feb 2009 @ 7:40am

Interesting
Major corps have been doing this for years.
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Virtual Web Symphony, 15 Feb 2009 @ 6:20am

China has been doing it
China has been doing it, we all are aware. But There is little which can be done about it.
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Carolyn Wood, 15 Feb 2009 @ 1:08pm

Re: Interesting
We still differentiate between corporate and government actions, right?
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Jeff, 29 May 2009 @ 1:39pm

I spent a lot of research on this and the winner is www.freedur.com. It beats lame proxify.net site – I can open any site through freedur.
I watch Youtube videos at work ! They have a portable version – I put it on my USB stick. Nothing to install – just run it and it jsut works.
Super easy proxy solution for me.
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