How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction

The Chinese government "fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year," according to a study conducted by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California San Diego.

The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptivewritings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinionsof ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claimthat these so-called "50c party" posts vociferously argue for the government's sidein political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of the vast majority ofposts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet, almost no systematic empiricalevidence exists for this claim, or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime'sstrategic objective in pursuing this activity. In the first large scale empirical analysisof 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 fabricatesand posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to priorclaims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with skepticsof the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. Weinfer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the publicand 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 censorshipprogram, and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of"common knowledge" and information control in authoritarian regimes.