> watch every conversation happening in real time
Eh.... are you sure? A lot of my childhood friends are now working in various ares of what you might consider 'authoritative post' or the infamous 有关部门 but I think it's still a bit too divorced from reality. Censorship and blatant blockage for sure but millions spying on billions in real time? I don't think that's how they work.
Yes, parent’s assertion is fairly preposterous. There is no way one could conduct surveillance on that scale in a non automated fashion. There are too many resources required.
> watch every conversation happening in real time.
Even with 2 million people, you can’t follow even a fraction of the conversations of 1000x the population without automation doing most of the heavy lifting.
Peng Shuai was a recent censorship failure that has cost the party face globally.
You only has to shut down the major channels. Over 22,000 influencers were openly censored last year. Even in the past week, several Olympics-related hashtags have been blocked on Weibo. You can control the conversation even with just one person.
well I'm not sure whether the goal is to "save the party's face". To be honest it could be anybody, any hot issues of celeb big or small or could even be nobody can ignite some kind of sentiment, just like anywhere else. The difference is that domestically although censored, the social issues were sometimes genuinely flagged / monitored and led to change for better polices, in a sort of top down / authoritarian way, which to be honest surprises me.
It depends on how you define employed for censorship roles. On Douyin there are a lot of memes about passing censorship as a writer/reporter, jokes like 'night is dark' but it's actually 'night club'. Plenty of turks are just mechanically checking according to a theme. 'No brainer' as they call it. What's considered lighthearted there is probably horrifying sounding here.
