China fabricates 488 million
social media posts a year for strategic distraction, says study, ny Sarmistha
Acharya, 5/20/16
The Chinese government fabricates
and posts about 448 million social media comments per year, a new study
suggests. The goal behind the secret operation is apparently to distract people
from bad news and political debates.
Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret
E Roberts conducted their systematic study — How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media
Posts for Strategic Distraction, not
Engaged
Argument — of internet propaganda
workers, who are known as the Fifty Cent party. The party workers are rumoured
to receive a payment of 50 Chinese cents by the government for each social
media posting.
The Fifty Cent party does not
usually engage in debates with critics or make fun of foreign governments. But
they distract public attention from important topics with their posts that
involve cheerleading for China, the Communist Party or other symbols of the
regime.
These party workers begin their
action immediately after some social unrest and then try to distract the
opinion of the people with social media posts. There were a total of 1,100
posts about China Dream and local development soon after the Shanshan riots in
Xinjiang, in July 2013.
In an email statement issued to Bloomberg, Gary King said, "In retrospect, this makes a lot of
sense — stopping an argument is best done by distraction and changing the
subject rather than more argument — but this had previously been unknown."
The researchers found out that
almost all of the posts were by workers at government agencies such as tax and
human resource departments and courts. The researchers say they did not find
any evidence that the people were getting paid for their social media posts and
say this was possibly a part of their job responsibilities.
The study reveals 52.7% of these
positive posts appear on government websites and the rest of the 212 million
posts are inserted into approximately 80 billion social media posts. A large
proportion of comments on government websites and about one in every 178 social
media posts on commercial websites are fabricated by the government, says the
study. The sites that are affected by the social media posts are run by Tencent
Holdings, Sina and Baidu.
The research team based their
findings on an archive of emails leaked from the Internet Propaganda Office of
Zhanggong, which is a district of Ganzhou City in Jiangxi province. The emails
contained explicit details of the work of numerous members of the Fifty Cent
Group. The team claims to have identified 2,341 emails, nearly half of which
contained a Fifty Cent post, with the total number of posts being 43,797.
The researchers even used machine
learning to find out Fifty Cent posts in other parts of China. "Of course,
the difficulties of interpreting these answers is complicated by the fact that
our survey respondents are conducting surreptitious operations on behalf of the
Chinese government designed to fool users of social media into thinking that
they are ordinary citizens and we are asking them about this very
activity," noted the researchers in their paper.
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