Posted on 05/12/2006 6:16:15 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
May 9, 2006
As Chinese Students Go Online, Little Sister Is Watching
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
SHANGHAI, May 8 — To her fellow students, Hu Yingying appears to be a typical undergraduate, plain of dress, quick with a smile and perhaps possessed with a little extra spring in her step, but otherwise decidedly ordinary.
And for Ms. Hu, a sophomore at Shanghai Normal University, coming across as ordinary is just fine, given the parallel life she leads. For several hours each week she repairs to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers, where she logs in unsuspected by other students to help police her school's Internet forums.
Once online, following suggestions from professors or older students, she introduces politically correct or innocuous themes for discussion. Recently, she says, she started a discussion of what celebrities make the best role models, a topic suggested by a professor as appropriate.
Politics, even school politics, is banned on university bulletin boards like these. Ms. Hu says she and her fellow moderators try to steer what they consider negative conversations in a positive direction with well-placed comments of their own. Anything they deem offensive, she says, they report to the school's Web master for deletion.
During some heated anti-Japanese demonstrations last year, for example, moderators intervened to cool nationalist passions, encouraging students to mute criticisms of Japan.
Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator — and all without the knowledge of her fellow students — Ms. Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet. For years China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping!
So our mods are little Chinese girls in Shanghai? I guess Jim has been outsourcing.
Also posted here from another source
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1629322/posts
The People's Daily messageboard has a ton of people like that on it. They were all minders to make sure no one talked "inappropriately".
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