China continues its crackdown on porn by upping the incentives for citizens willing to rat out their fellow man. If you find porn, you can report the content and its publisher to the authorities and earn yourself almost £70,000 (600,000 yuan).
Tech in Asia reports that the scheme is in place as of December 1. Considering last year’s figures showed the countries average salary was 74,318 yuan, there are bound to be some hard up people willing to turn to porn bounty hunting.
One user wrote on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media site: “I’m not going to work today. I’ll look everywhere for materials so I can report anyone who I find disagreeable. There’s money to be made in reporting, so what am I doing working myself to death?”
It’s all part of the rollout of a new plan from the government’s National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications department. It announced last week that this reward is part of the mission to clean up the internet. The government has previously criticised Weibo and WeChat for how the sites have allowed illegal content to circulate.
In November, the writer of homoerotic fiction that had been promoted on Weibo and sold online was sentenced to 10 years in jail. Reports in the state-owned paper, the Global Times, said the writer who had gone by the pen name Tianyi had promoted “obscene sexual behaviour between males.” It also said the book was “full of perverted sexual acts like violence and abuse”.
The war against porn has already seen thousands of websites taken down. However, it’s all a part of the government’s wider efforts to control the internet and the information people share online.