You Can Get Paid $32,000 A Year In China Just To Search For Porn
China has declared war on Internet pornography with "Cleaning the Web 2014," a campaign designed to shut down websites or social media accounts featuring anything that could be considered sexually suggestive.
Online companies participating in the initiative have begun hiring porn watchdogs, or "sexual content appraisers," who surf the web for images of everything from people having sex to women in bikinis.
The jobs pay up to $32,000 a year and thousands of people applied, but it's nowhere near as fun as one might imagine.
"When I do the appraisal, all I am thinking about is whether the content meets the standards for sexual content or whether the content in the video or disc is publicly advertising sex or showing sex. Some people think it's just watching porn, but it's not. Sometimes it makes me throw up," a police officer who works as a porn watchdog told the Hollywood Reporter.
Most of the watchdog's day isn't looking at actual porn, but determining if the Chinese government would approve of a picture of an article of clothing or a romantic couple.
Even a female cartoon character wearing short shorts is deemed too racy for the Chinese web, which already bans Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and various other Western sites.
The porn crackdown has already shut down 110 websites and roughly 3,300 social media accounts. Websites can receive massive fines if they are found to contain pornographic content, and someone found guilty of posting porn can go to jail for up to three years.
Anyone who has made over $40,000 from any porn-related business can go to jail for life.
Sina Corp, the owner of Sina Weibo (China's version of Twitter) was handed the largest fine yet last week. The company was fined the equivalent of $815,038 for hosting "unhealthy and indecent content" and stripped of some publication licenses such as the right to distribute audiovisual content.
The fine comes days after Weibo went public in an IPO in New York and thus crippled its share price.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the punishment wasn't limited to pornographic images, but also to online publications with sexual words such as "temptress" and "dream lover" on the site.
These articles, some of which obtained over a million reads, were said to be "endangering public morality and seriously harming minors' physical and mental health."
The campaign will last until November and is expected to remove the operating licenses of many more popular sites.
via Hollywood Reporter, Photo Credit: Shutterstock
