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A new set of documents reviewed by The New York Times have laid out in stark detail how Chinese government officials ‘manipulate’ Facebook and Twitter. The report reveals that China’s communist government floods social media with fake accounts in an effort to advance an authoritarian agenda and seek out critics of the state under the guise of bot networks.
Using bot networks, the Chinese government is able to generate automatic posts and online personas that are hard to trace, while making fake accounts look real and grow their numbers and followers. The goal of the government’s global online campaign is to polish up its image and subvert accusations of human rights abuses. Through the shadowy campaign, the government is also able to look for online critics of the state – and find out who they are and where they live.
The New York Times’s review of the documents goes into in-depth detail about how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate content for the accounts on demand, draw followers, track critics and provide a range of services for information campaigns. The deceitful operation is increasingly happening on international platforms Facebook and Twitter, both of which are blocked in China by the government.
The documents were part of a request for bids from contractors and provide a rarely seen glimpse into how China’s vast bureaucracy works to generate state propaganda and mould opinion on global social media platforms. The documents were taken offline after The Times contacted the Chinese government about them.
The New York Times reports that on 21 May, a branch of Shanghai police posted an online notice seeking bids from private contractors for what is known among Chinese government officials as ‘public opinion management’. Officials have been relying on tech contractors to help keep them informed about domestic social media and actively sculpt public opinion through censorship and the propagation of fake posts at home. It is only recently, however, that the opinion management industry turned their attention beyond China, the report claims.
In the notice, Shanghai police were seeking to create hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other major social media platforms. The police department emphasised that the task is time sensitive, which indicates the police must be ready to release the accounts quickly to direct the narrative.
According to The New York Times, Botlike networks of accounts like those the Shanghai police wants to purchase have driven a huge online surge in pro-China traffic over the course of the last two years. For example, sometimes the social media posts from such networks support official government accounts with likes or reposts, whilst other times they attack social media users who are critical towards government policies.
In their report, The New York Times says that: “The Shanghai police’s social media effort is not just a numbers game, and this portion of the document underscores efforts to shift from brute-force tactics like using bot armies to something more subversive:
The online notice put out by Shanghai police requested help to:
“Disguise and maintain overseas social media accounts. Suppliers should package a portion of the overseas accounts into a group of premium accounts, that is, accounts that survive for a long period of time, have a certain number of fans, and can be used to promote information. Each month on each platform three accounts must be maintained, and an increase in fans must be guaranteed each month. Note: this project has intermediate time sensitivity. Each week, the number of posts and survival rate of accounts will be calculated. If an account is suspended, it needs to be fixed in a timely fashion”.
The New York Times, in their analysis, also said: “The police department was seeking an upgrade in sophistication and power: a series of accounts with organic followers that can be turned to government aims whenever necessary.
“The request suggested that police officials understood the need for strong engagement with the public through these profiles-for-hire. The deeper engagement lends the fake personas credibility at a time when social media companies are increasingly taking down accounts that seem inauthentic or coordinated.”
It added: “Bot networks that have been linked to China’s government stand out for their lack of engagement with other accounts, disinformation experts say. Though they can be used to troll others and boost the number of likes on official government posts, most of those automated accounts have little influence individually since they have few followers.”
With increasing frequency, China’s internet police have tracked down and threatened internet users who voice their opinions. While at first its agents focused on local social media platforms, in 2018 they launched a new campaign to detain users of Twitter inside China – account owners who had found a way around the government’s ban on its use – and force them to delete their accounts. The campaign has now extended to citizens of China living outside the country.
The document analysed by The New York Times detailed how Shanghai police wanted to find out the identities of those behind certain accounts and to trace their users’ connections to the mainland. Its officers then have the power to detain the account holders when they return to the country in order to pressurise online critics into deleting posts or even their accounts entirely.
The analysis detailed how in previous Chinese information campaigns, botlike accounts have been employed to gather an unrealistic number of likes and retweets to government and state media posts.
“The contrived flurry of traffic can make the posts more likely to be shown by recommendation algorithms on many social media sites and search engines,” The New York Times explains. Recently, “a similar pattern emerged from a network of botlike accounts amplifying evidence that was issued by state-media journalists, purporting to show that tennis player Peng Shuai was safe, freely eating dinner in Beijing and attending a youth tennis tournament,” the paper claims.
In their online notice, Shanghai police explained with clarity how it desires functionality, demonstrating its own knowledge of algorithms on social media. This approach is a nod to the fact that a large group of junk accounts can briefly make one post from an official account appear to go viral, injecting it with a sense of credibility and giving it greater exposure, something that propaganda, something that propaganda officials know very well.
As worldwide Chinese propaganda campaigns have developed, they have gained a greater reliance on visual content, with Chinese officials seeking out a company to not only maintain and deploy fake accounts, but to also make original content, with the demand for video content being high.
A separate document which was reviewed by The Times reveals that the same branch of Shanghai police bought video-making services from another company in November, with the police asking the supplier to provide at least 20 videos monthly and to distribute them on social media at home and overseas. The document called the task ‘original video production’ that would be used to fight the “battle of public opinion”.
An analysis carried out earlier this year by The New York Times and ProPublica illustrated how thousands of videos portraying members of the Uyghur ethnic minority leading happy and free lives were a crucial part of an information campaign that Twitter ultimately attributed to the Chinese Communist Party.
Last week, Gript reported on a new Chinese propaganda video mocking American democracy to the tune of the song ‘Wellerman’; the sea shanty that went viral in Ireland and the UK over the summer. The video was posted to the Ambassade de Chine en France Twitter account (the Chinese Embassy in France).
The first words of the scathing song, which is sung by a female singer surrounded by animated animals are: “It’s Ameri-cracy!!! Use democracy as a cloak, Americ-cracy rules the world. If any country said no, you would bash it as your foe.”
It continues to boast about Chinese ‘democracy’ whilst accusing the US of ‘disinformation’ and ‘gerrymandering’: “Democracy of our own, reflects our culture, will and soul. If your system can cure all, why did it cause so many woes? Inside of the country money talks. All policies submit to the corp. Disinformation, Gerrymandering skew election results,” adding that the US is “scoffed at” by China.
The video serves as a continuation of China’s Communist leaders’ blunt ridicule of western-Style democracy. Democratic systems, like those in the United States, are “doomed to fail,” top Chinese officials said earlier this month in the run up to President Biden’s democracy summit which took place two weeks ago.
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