How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument
How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument
复制标题
DOI：
10.1017/s0003055417000144
复制
发表时间：
2017-08-01
影响因子：
6.8
通讯作者：
Roberts, Margaret E.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
King, Gary;Pan, Jennifer;Roberts, Margaret E.
长期以来，中国政府一直被怀疑雇佣了多达200万人，在真实的社交媒体帖子中暗中插入大量假名和其他欺骗性文字，就好像它们是普通民众的真实观点一样。许多学者、大多数记者和活动人士声称，这些所谓的 50c 政党帖子在政治和政策辩论中大力支持政府一方。正如我们所展示的，社交媒体上公开指责 50c 的大多数帖子也是如此。然而，几乎没有系统的经验证据支持这一说法，更重要的是，没有系统的经验证据支持中国政权进行这一活动的战略目标。在对此操作的首次大规模实证分析中，我们展示了如何识别这些帖子的秘密作者、他们撰写的帖子及其内容。我们估计，政府每年编造并发布约 4.48 亿条社交媒体评论。与之前的说法相反，我们表明中国政权的策略是避免与党和政府的怀疑论者争论，甚至不讨论有争议的问题。我们表明，这一大规模秘密行动的目的是分散公众注意力并转移话题，因为这些帖子大多涉及为中国加油、共产党的革命历史或该政权的其他象征。我们讨论这些结果如何与我们对中国审查制度的了解相吻合，并提出它们如何改变我们对独裁政权中的常识和信息控制的更广泛的理论理解。
The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2 million people to surreptitiously insert huge numbers of pseudonymous and other deceptive writings into the stream of real social media posts, as if they were the genuine opinions of ordinary people. Many academics, and most journalists and activists, claim that these so-called 50c party posts vociferously argue for the government's side in political and policy debates. As we show, this is also true of most posts openly accused on social media of being 50c. Yet almost no systematic empirical evidence exists for this claim or, more importantly, for the Chinese regime's strategic objective in pursuing this activity. In the first large-scale empirical analysis of 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 fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year. In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime's strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We show that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject, as most of 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 censorship program and suggest how they may change our broader theoretical understanding of common knowledge and information control in authoritarian regimes.