There’s software for monitoring social media, but it takes more than a program to understand sentiment and visual meanings. When you’re as large as China, the number of eyeballs necessary to keep everyone in line on microblogging sites is tremendous.
The Beijing News says the monitors, described as internet opinion analysts, are on state and commercial payrolls.
China’s hundreds of millions of web users increasingly use microblogs to criticise the state or vent anger.
Recent research suggested Chinese censors actively target social media.