As China expands efforts to "clean up" its cyberspace, Chinese social media giants are getting their users to join in the effort as well.

Tech giant Tencent said on Jan. 1 that it was hiring 200 content reviewers to form a "penguin patrol unit", named after the company's penguin platform - an open platform that allows content creators to easily distribute their content across a wide variety of Tencent platforms, including Wechat and QQ.

Internet patrol unit

And the job of these 200 reviewers, made up of 10 journalists, 70 content producers, and 120 regular internet users?

Flag "low-quality" content.

According to Quartz, these are the job requirements:

• Reviewers are required to make at least 300 reports each month about "harmful information", including porn, sensational headlines, plagiarism, fake news, or old news.
• Those who complete the mission will get 30 virtual coins which can be used to purchase items on Tencent's QQ chat app.
• For those who fail to meet the reporting quota 3 times, they'll be fired from the unit.

Similar efforts on other platforms

Weibo, the micro-blogging platform which has more than 300 million users, also put out a similar notice last Sept.

It said that it ended up recruiting 776 people who managed to report around 1.3 million instances of pornographic information in Nov.

The group paid the supervisors RMB200 (~S$41) in subsidies for internet fees per month, with the top performer winning an iPhone 8 Plus.

The top 20 performers are also rewarded with various products such as portable chargers and air purifiers.

Netizens who relish spotting such 'undesirable' content and reporting them to the authorities may turn it into a full-time job too.

Jinri Toutiao, an artificial intelligence-backed news app, announced on Jan. 3 that it was hiring 2,000 content reviewers for a monthly salary of RMB4,000 to RMB6,000 (~S$817 to S$1,230).

First preference is given to Communist Party members or candidates with "good political sensitivity".

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Ongoing internet crackdown

China has been cracking down on the internet for the past one year, tightening its scrutiny of user-generated content on the various social media platforms and banning the use of certain politically sensitive key words.

The task of neutralising negative comments is also shared by its army of nationalist trolls who churns out patriotic social media posts and guards the country against the slightest hint of criticism.

Top image via Weibo