The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has opened a new front in its long, ambitious war to shape global public opinion: Western social media.
Liu Xiaoming (劉曉明), who recently stepped down as China’s ambassador to the UK, is one of the party’s most successful foot soldiers on this evolving online battlefield. He joined Twitter in October 2019, as scores of Chinese diplomats surged onto Twitter and Facebook, which are banned in China.
Since then, Liu has deftly elevated his public profile, gaining more than 119,000 followers as he transformed himself into an exemplar of China’s new sharp-edged “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a term borrowed from the title of a top-grossing Chinese action movie.
Illustration: Mountain People
“As I see it, there are so-called ‘wolf warriors’ because there are ‘wolves’ in the world and you need warriors to fight them,” Liu, who is now China’s Special Representative on Korean Peninsula Affairs, wrote on Twitter in February.
His stream of posts — principled and gutsy ripostes to Western anti-Chinese bias to his fans, but aggressive bombast to his detractors — were retweeted more than 43,000 times from June last year through February alone.
However, much of the popular support Liu and many of his colleagues seem to enjoy on Twitter has in fact been manufactured.
A seven-month investigation by The Associated Press (AP) and the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at the University of Oxford, found that China’s rise on Twitter has been powered by an army of fake accounts that have retweeted posts by Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times, covertly amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people — often without disclosing the fact that the content is Chinese government-sponsored.
More than half the retweets Liu got from June last year through January came from accounts that Twitter has suspended for contravening the platform’s rules, which prohibit manipulation. Overall, more than 10 percent of the retweets 189 Chinese diplomats got in that time frame came from accounts that Twitter had suspended by March 1.
Twitter’s suspensions did not stop the pro-China amplification machine. An additional cluster of fake accounts, many of them impersonating Britons, continued to push government content, racking up more than 16,000 retweets and replies before Twitter in the past few weeks kicked them off, in response to the AP and Oxford investigation.
This fiction of popularity can boost the status of China’s messengers, creating a mirage of broad support. It can also distort platform algorithms, which are designed to boost the distribution of popular posts, potentially exposing more genuine users to Chinese propaganda.
While individual fake accounts might not seem to have an effect on their own, over time and at scale, such networks can distort the information environment, deepening the reach and authenticity of China’s messaging.
“You have a seismic, slow but large continental shift in narratives,” said Timothy Graham, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who studies social networks. “Steer it just a little bit over time, it can have massive impact.”
Twitter and other social media sites have identified inauthentic pro-China networks before. However, the AP and Oxford investigation for the first time shows that large-scale inauthentic amplification has broadly driven engagement across official government and state media accounts, adding to evidence that Beijing’s appetite for guiding public opinion — covertly, if necessary — extends beyond its borders and beyond core strategic interests, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Twitter’s takedowns often came only after weeks or months of activity. The study identified 26,879 accounts that retweeted Chinese diplomats or state media nearly 200,000 times before getting suspended. They accounted for a significant share of the total retweets, sometimes more than half, that many diplomatic accounts got on Twitter.
It was not possible to determine whether the accounts were sponsored by the government.
Twitter told AP that many of the accounts had been sanctioned for manipulation, but declined to offer details on what other platform contravention might have been at play. Twitter said it was investigating whether the activity was a state-affiliated information operation.
“We will continue to investigate and action accounts that violate our platform manipulation policy, including accounts associated with these networks,” Twitter said in a statement. “If we have clear evidence of state-affiliated information operations, our first priority is to enforce our rules and remove accounts engaging in this behavior. When our investigations are complete, we disclose all accounts and content in our public archive.”
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it does not employ trickery on social media.
“There is no so-called misleading propaganda, nor exporting a model of online public opinion guidance,” the ministry said in a statement to the AP. “We hope that the relevant parties will abandon their discriminatory attitude, take off their tinted glasses, and take a peaceful, objective, and rational approach in the spirit of openness and inclusiveness.”
IDEOLOGICAL BATTLEFIELD
Twitter and Facebook function as formidable and one-sided global megaphones for the CCP, helping to amplify messaging broadly set by central authorities.
Today, at least 270 Chinese diplomats in 126 countries are active on Twitter and Facebook. Together with Chinese state media, they control 449 accounts on the networks, on which they posted nearly 950,000 times between June last year and February.
These messages were “liked” more than 350 million times, and replied to and shared more than 27 million times, according to the AP and Oxford analysis. Three-quarters of Chinese diplomats on Twitter joined within the past two years.
The move onto Western social media comes as China wages a war for influence on the Internet, at home and abroad.
“On the battlefield of the Internet, whether we can withstand and win is directly related to our country’s ideological security and political security,” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) said in 2013, not long after taking power.
In September 2019, as Chinese diplomats flocked to Twitter, Xi gave another speech, urging party cadres to strengthen their “fighting spirit.”
Xi has reconfigured China’s Internet governance, tightening controls, and bound Chinese media more tightly to the party, to ensure, as he said in a 2016 speech, that the media loves, protects and serves the party.
That intimacy was formalized in 2018, when the party consolidated administrative control of major print, radio, film and television outlets under its Central Propaganda Department.
Like other nations, China has recognized the value of social media for amplifying its messaging and reinforcing its hold on power, but unfettered access to Western social media has given Beijing a unilateral advantage in the global fight for influence.
Twitter and Facebook are blocked within China, and Beijing controls the conversation on domestic alternatives like WeChat and Sina Weibo, effectively cutting off unmediated access to the Chinese public.
“It’s creating a significant challenge for Western democracies. We don’t have the same capacity to influence international audiences given that China has walled off its Internet,” said Jacob Wallis, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre. “That creates a significant asymmetric advantage.”
Despite the high levels of Chinese government activity, Twitter and Facebook have failed to label state content consistently. In an effort to provide users with more context, Twitter last year began labeling accounts belonging to “key government officials” and state-affiliated media.
By March 1, Twitter had labeled just 14 percent of Chinese diplomatic accounts on the platform, failing even to flag dozens of verified profiles.
Twitter said that in keeping with its policy of labeling senior officials and institutions that speak for a country abroad, not all diplomatic accounts would be flagged. It offered no further detail on how those decisions are made and declined to provide a list of accounts that have been labeled.
Facebook last year began putting transparency labels on state-controlled media accounts, but disclosure is especially weak in languages other than English, despite the fact that Chinese state content has strong distribution in Spanish, French and Arabic, among other languages.
Facebook had labeled two-thirds of a sample of 95 Chinese state media accounts in English, as of March 1, but less than one-quarter of accounts in other languages. Unlike Twitter, Facebook does not flag diplomatic accounts, the majority of which are official embassy and consulate accounts.
Facebook labeled an additional 41 Chinese state media outlets that AP and Oxford flagged, bringing the overall portion of labeled accounts from less than half to nearly 90 percent.
The company said it was looking into the rest.
“We apply the label on a rolling basis and will continue to label more publishers and pages over time,” a company spokesperson said.
The company declined to provide a full list of which Chinese state media accounts it has flagged.
The China Media Project, a Hong Kong-based research group, found that transparency labels make a difference. Twitter users liked and shared fewer tweets by Chinese news media after August last year, when the platform started flagging them as state-affiliated media, and stopped amplifying and recommending their content.
“We need the labels,” China Media Project director David Bandurski said, although he cautioned that they risk painting all Chinese media with the same broad brush, including publications like Caixin that have managed to maintain a degree of independence.
“This is all about co-opting the narrative,” he said. “Telling China’s story means we, the party, get to tell China’s story and no one else. That is happening in Portuguese and Spanish and French. It really is a global plan.”
The outspoken editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times, Hu Xijin (胡錫進), noticed the effect immediately.
In August last year, he tweeted his dismay at the “China state-affiliated media” label that had been added to his profile, saying that his follower growth had plummeted.
“It seems Twitter will eventually choke my account,” he wrote.
COUNTERFEITING CONSENSUS
In early February, China’s Xinhua news agency published a “fact check” of 24 “lies” it said anti-China forces in the West had been spreading about Xinjiang, where China stands accused of genocide for its brutal, systematic repression of minority Uighur Muslims.
According to Xinhua, the real problem in Xinjiang is not human rights, but Uighur terrorism.
Beijing has brought stability and economic development to its restive western region, and information suggesting otherwise has been fabricated by US intelligence agencies, a racist academic and lying witnesses, Xinhua said.
The story was picked up by other Chinese state media, amplified by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs at a news conference, and blasted across Twitter by the ministry and Chinese diplomats in the US, India, Djibouti, Canada, Hungary, Austria, Tanzania, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Liberia, Grenada, Nigeria, Lebanon, Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar and the UK.
From there, it was further amplified by devoted, but mysterious fans, such as Twitter user gyagyagya10, whose accounts within seconds pushed out identical quote-tweets of a message about Xinjiang posted by the Chinese embassy in London, writing: “Ethnic groups in China are well protected, no matter in economic aspect or in cultural aspect.”
This is the CCP’s global propaganda machine in action. Messages set by key state media and the foreign ministry get picked up by Chinese diplomats around the world, who repackage the content on Twitter, where it is amplified by networks of fake and suspicious accounts working covertly to shape public discourse for the benefit of the CCP.
Gyagyagya10, who had a single follower, was part of a network of 62 accounts dedicated to amplifying Chinese diplomats in the UK that Marcel Schliebs, the lead researcher from the University of Oxford on the project, found exhibited multiple patterns suggesting coordination and inauthenticity.
Little can be gleaned about gyagyagya10 from the image of abstract art posted as a profile picture and the lack of any sort of personal description. Indeed, none of the accounts in the network had fleshed-out profiles with recognizable names and authentic profile photos.
Gyagyagya10’s account came to life in August last year at the same time as more than a dozen other accounts that also devoted themselves exclusively to promoting tweets by Liu and the Chinese embassy in London.
Then, after Liu left his post at the end of January, they went quiet.
The 62 accounts in the network retweeted and replied to posts by Chinese diplomats in London nearly 30,000 times from June last year to the end of January, the study found.
They exhibited unique patterns in the ways they amplified content.
Like gyagyagya10, they often simultaneously posted identical quote-tweets and replies, and they repeatedly used identical phrases like “Xinjiang is beautiful” and “shared future for mankind” in their comments.
Other users who engaged with the two diplomatic accounts did neither.
The accounts the study identified were also slavish in their devotion, sometimes replying to more than three-quarters of all Liu’s tweets. Most weeks, the fake accounts generated at least 30 to 50 percent of all retweets of Liu and the Chinese embassy in London.
By March 1, Twitter had suspended 31 of the accounts in the pro-China UK network and two had been deleted. The remaining 29, including gyagyagya10, continued to operate, churning out more than 10,000 retweets and nearly 6,000 replies in support of Chinese diplomats in the UK before Twitter started permanently suspending them for platform manipulation at the end of last month in response to this investigation.
“We are also aware of concerns about some of the Twitter rules,” the embassy said in a statement. “If it is against the rules of social media to retweet the Chinese Embassy’s tweets, then shouldn’t these rules be more applicable to retweets of malicious rumors, smears, and false information against China? We hope relevant companies will not adopt double standards.”
The ministry said that China uses social media the same way other nations do, with the goal of deepening friendly ties and facilitating fact-based communication.
In practice, China’s network on Twitter amplifies messaging set by central authorities, both for domestic and global consumption, as diplomats translate and repackage content from the ministry and key state media outlets, network analysis and academic research show.
Zhao Alexandre Huang (黃釗), a visiting professor at Gustave Eiffel University in Paris, analyzed social media messaging at key points in the US-China trade dispute and found that content first published on the Sina Weibo account of the ministry was repackaged and broadcast around the world by Chinese diplomats on Twitter.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs uses Weibo like a central kitchen of information,” Huang said. “It’s an illusion of polyphony.”
Within China’s state network on Twitter, the most referenced accounts belonged to the ministry and its spokespeople, as well as People’s Daily, CGTN, China Daily and Xinhua, and the most active amplifiers were diplomats, an analysis showed.
The CCP’s efforts on Twitter have been helped by a core of hyperactive super-fans. Some 151,000 users retweeted posts by Chinese diplomats from June last year through January. Nearly half of all retweets came from just 1 percent of those accounts, which together blasted out nearly 360,000 retweets, often in bursts of activity separated by just seconds.
Among the biggest beneficiaries of this concentrated bulk engagement — which is not necessarily inauthentic — were Chinese diplomatic accounts in Poland, Pakistan, India and South Africa, as well as the ministry and its spokespeople.
The pro-China accounts that Twitter suspended were active in a host of languages, with profile descriptions in English, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Italian, French, Russian, Korean, Urdu, Portuguese, Thai, Swedish, Japanese, Turkish, German and Tamil. Some worked cross-network to amplify a range of government accounts, while others appeared to function as smaller cells, dedicated to amplifying diplomats in a specific location.
This manufactured chorus accounted for a significant portion of all the engagement many Chinese diplomats got on Twitter. More than 60 percent of all retweets for the Chinese embassies in Angola and Greece from June last year through January came from accounts that have been suspended. Ministry spokespeople Hua Chunying (華春瑩) and Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) racked up more than 20,000 retweets from accounts that have been sanctioned by Twitter.
COMMENTING SYSTEMS
Within China, manipulation of online discourse has been effectively institutionalized. It remains to be seen how aggressive and how successful China might be in implementing its model of public opinion guidance on Western social media, which was founded on the civic values of transparency, authenticity and the free exchange of ideas.
The CCP’s systems for shaping public opinion online also include much broader tactics. Budget documents for Chinese propaganda and cyberspace departments include references to cyberarmies, teams of trained online commentators tasked with keeping conversation online aligned with the party’s interests.
Universities in China post announcements about their teams of “online commentators” and “youth Internet civilization volunteers,” composed exclusively of recruits who “love the motherland,” and work to guide public opinion by eliminating negative influences and spreading positive energy online.
For-profit companies are also contracted by government agencies to run coordinated networks of social media accounts, both human and automated, to help “guide public opinion,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Asia Program, and Jessica Batke, a senior editor at ChinaFile, an online magazine published by the Asia Society.
They poured through thousands of Chinese government procurement notices to identify tenders for such services.
While the majority were for opinion management on domestic platforms, Ohlberg said that a growing number have since 2017 targeted Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
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