China’s online propaganda generates 488 million “positive” comments a year
A study by Gary King and his research team found that China has invested in generating favourable online comments. In addition to government employees, anti-change volunteers do their part. Currently, a nationwide drive is underway to get 10.5 million youth volunteers to banish Western influence from social media.
Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – A team of researchers at Harvard University in the United States carried out a large-scale empirical analysis of online comments in China.
It found that an estimated 488 million social media comments have been posted a year to deflect public criticism against Communist China, involving mostly government civilian or military employees but also volunteers who want to avoid drastic changes in society or calm anger against the authorities.
The researchers found no evidence the commentators received extra payment for the posts because they were government workers and it was part of their job.
Gary King, one of America’s most distinguished political scientists, and his team carried out the analysis of online comments by the so-called ‘50-cent gang’ (wumao dang) paid for each online post made in defence of the government. Their results indicate that this is a mistaken belief.
The team examined more than 2,000 leaked e-mails from a district government internet propaganda office in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, dating from February 2013 to November 2014.
Most messages were communications between authorities and the so-called 50-centers on their assignments and work reports.
Over a year, the researchers identified almost 43,800 messages posted online, finding virtually all of them – more than 99 per cent – were generated by employees at more than 200 government agencies.
This is how King’s team estimated the government posted about 488 million social media comments a year to deflect public criticism.
Prof Qiao Mu, of Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the study shed light on the distraction strategy adopted by Chinese internet censors.
“These people – who are not getting paid or ordered to post online – do not want to see drastic changes in society and they are voluntarily defending the authorities,” Qiao said.
Their influence in shaping public opinion could be even larger than the government employees, who were simply “getting their job done without worrying about the impact”, he explained.
At the same time, to boost online control, the General Office of the Central Leading Group on Cyberspace Affairs (CLGCA) and the Communist Youth League recently announced plans to recruit nationwide 10.5 million “Youth Volunteers for Internet Civilization,” writes Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a major China expert.
As part of this effort, “Each major university was assigned quotas of several thousand such volunteers whose job is to ensure that politically incorrect and ‘Westernized’ materials are banished from the Internet and the social media.”
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