BEIJING: China’s government fabricates and posts several hundred million social media posts a year to influence public opinion about the country, according to a new paper by US researchers examining one of the most opaque aspects of the Communist Party’s rule.
The academic study led by Harvard political scientist Gary King claims to be one of the first in-depth looks into the inner workings of China’s push to influence public opinion by flooding social media with posts portrayed as if they were coming from ordinary people.
Aside from possessing highly sophisticated censorship controls to find and delete content outright, China’s government has long been known to employ a huge group of Internet workers, known colloquially as the “Fifty Cent Party,” to influence discourse in subtler ways. The name originates from a popular rumor — never substantiated — that such people are paid 50 cents per pro-government post.
The research project, which took advantage of a trove of government e-mails, spreadsheets and work reports from a propaganda office in central China leaked online in 2014, concludes that an estimated 488 million fake posts a year “enables the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise.”
The academic study led by Harvard political scientist Gary King claims to be one of the first in-depth looks into the inner workings of China’s push to influence public opinion by flooding social media with posts portrayed as if they were coming from ordinary people.
Aside from possessing highly sophisticated censorship controls to find and delete content outright, China’s government has long been known to employ a huge group of Internet workers, known colloquially as the “Fifty Cent Party,” to influence discourse in subtler ways. The name originates from a popular rumor — never substantiated — that such people are paid 50 cents per pro-government post.
The research project, which took advantage of a trove of government e-mails, spreadsheets and work reports from a propaganda office in central China leaked online in 2014, concludes that an estimated 488 million fake posts a year “enables the government to actively control opinion without having to censor as much as they might otherwise.”
