Study: One Out Of Every 178 Posts To Chinese Social Media Is Government Propaganda

In Russia, we've talked about how Vladimir Putin employs a massive army of Internet trolls to ridicule and shout down political opponents and critics. In China, the government's tactics are notably different. According to a new study out of Harvard (pdf), the Chinese government posts about 488 million fake social media comments -- or roughly one day of Twitter's total global volume -- each year. In China, these propagandists have historically been dubbed the "50 Cent Party," because it was generally believed they were paid 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.

It's the first study of its kind, only made possible after a blogger by the name of "Xiaolan" leaked an archive of all 2013 and 2014 emails to and from the Zhanggong district's Internet Propaganda Office. Journalists had previously written news articles about the leaks, but the researchers in this case crafted custom code to thoroughly dissect and identify the posts across a wide variety of formats and track them to verified government accounts, leading researchers to conclude that an amazing one out of every 178 posts to Chinese social media was government propaganda.

But unlike Russia's tendency to pay ordinary citizens to parrot propaganda (which is ultimately what wound up exposing the practice), the study found that many of China's social media propagandists are government workers, for whom propaganda was just part of their overall job duties at existing agencies:

"Although those who post comments are often rumored to be ordinary citizens, the researchers were surprised to find that nearly all the posts were written by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts. The researchers said they found no evidence that people were paid for the posts, adding the work was probably part of the employees' job responsibilities. Fifty Cent Party is a derogatory term since it implies people are bought off cheaply."

And whereas Russia's online propaganda efforts tend to involve personally attacking critics, Chinese propaganda takes a notably different tack -- focusing more on feel-good nationalism and reminders of the Communist Party's revolutionary past. Like any government, the study highlights that China's biggest fear isn't from abroad -- but the country's own people -- a threat best handled with distraction, not direct confrontation:

"The main threat perceived by the Chinese regime in the modern era is not military attacks from foreign enemies but rather uprisings from their own people," they said. Revealing a paternalistic approach, the guiding policy of China's Fifty Cent Party appears to be that distraction is better than conflict. "Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone's back up (as new parents recognize fast)," they wrote.

Granted, distraction certainly isn't a new concept, and it only takes about five minutes watching U.S. cable news to realize we're pretty damn good at it here in the States. In fact, we're so good at distracting ourselves from issues of substance that it seems unlikely that the United States government would even need to spend money on an institutional-grade social media disinformation effort. Then again, maybe I was just paid fifty cents to say that.

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