The Chinese state media claimed that the authorities hire 2 million people to operate and monitor its infamous “Great Firewall”. The reports reveal that most of the employees perform keyword searches and check millions of messages being posted on a daily basis.

This huge number of employees shows just how low tech and human intensive the operations are. However, even with the collective being so huge, employees are still unable to prevent comments which are seen by the government as undesirable from being published and reposted.

The “Internet Police” are hired by the propaganda arm of the Chinese government and by a number of commercial websites. The country accounts for over 500 million Internet users, which makes China the largest online population in the world.

In case a western country wanted to carry out a similar operation, it would have its work cut out to justify it. For example, the UK industry observers estimated that if David Cameron wanted to set up a “Great Firewall of Britain” he would have to hire almost 210,000 people to run it. Taking into account the fact that British labor is much more expensive than Chinese one, it might make sense to consider outsourcing such an operation to China.

I thought it was more like 40 000