Posted on 01/19/2017 9:32:03 AM PST by AdmSmith
The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people.
Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the governments side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of the vast majority of posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet, almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime's strategic objective in pursuing this activity.
In the first large scale empirical analysis of this operation, we show how to identify the secretive authors of these posts, the posts written by them, and their content. We estimate that the government fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regimes strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We infer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime.
We discuss how these results fit with what is known about the Chinese censorship program, and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of common knowledge and information control in authoritarian regimes.
We have had them here. I outed one under the name “Cecil Rhodes Rides Again”. He was banned pretty quickly.
Chinese 2M social media army.
Same thing everyday at 4chan:
its Hollywood social justice Warriors who come in and write insane stuff to distract.
Wonder how many we have here? Especially with the prohibition against domestic propaganda being removed.
The Chinese censorship program isn’t new. It started with MAO and continues today. But, that’s just an opinion.
The strategy has been adopted by democrats and progressives for quite long time.
Oh without a doubt. But I was wondering how many people the US government uses this way. And not just here, but also FB, twitter, etc.
Their reach goes beyond China's border. They target overseas Chinese and are even active in websites of foreign countries, especially neighboring E. Asian countries. They enlist Chinese residing in those countries to push the regime's propaganda. They also infiltrate local political websites whose main users are not Chinese.
As this article says, there are so many of them, which makes it possible to carry out their operation far and wide.
Twitter does this too. I noticed when I read Twitter posts last year and many had the same anti-Trump postings.
I am betting the twitter users had no choice.
They could voluntarily sign up for Chicom propaganda efforts. Chinese regime does not have to pay them. Their business interest or personal connection is a strong motivation.
On the other hand, there are many ethnic Chinese who hate mainland Chinese with passion. The most scathing criticisms of China tend to come from them. Many of them are angry at or ashamed of what mainland Chinese regime or people do. They resent Chinese regime trying to impose their oppressive control on them, or unruly deplorable behaviors of Chinese tourists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.