Capturing Clicks: How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait to Compete for Visibility
Capturing Clicks: How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait to Compete for Visibility
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DOI：
10.1080/10584609.2020.1765914
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发表时间：
2020-07
影响因子：
7.5
通讯作者：
Yingda Lu;Jennifer Pan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Yingda Lu;Jennifer Pan
摘要社交媒体和数字技术的激增使政府有必要将其关注点扩展到宣传内容之外，以便有效地传播宣传。我们确定了一个策略，使用点击诱饵，以增加政治宣传的知名度。我们通过将民族志与一个新的数据集的计算分析相结合，展示了这种策略在中国各地的使用，该数据集包含了213个中国市级政府在微信上发布的197，303个宣传帖子的标题。我们发现，中国的宣传人员面临着巨大的压力，要在社交媒体上展示他们的有效性，因为他们的工作是大量量化的-测量，分析和排名-与指标，如意见和喜欢。广告商使用点击诱饵和非宣传内容（例如，生活方式提示），以捕捉点击，但更依赖于点击诱饵，因为它不会减少空间可用于政治宣传。政府宣传机构使用clickbait的速度与商业和名人社交媒体账户相当。点击诱饵的使用与更多的观点和喜欢有关，以及政府宣传渠道和信息的更大影响力。这些结果揭示了社交媒体的商业模式和可供性如何影响政治宣传，以及政府控制信息的策略如何超越审查、宣传和虚假信息。
ABSTRACT The proliferation of social media and digital technologies has made it necessary for governments to expand their focus beyond propaganda content in order to disseminate propaganda effectively. We identify a strategy of using clickbait to increase the visibility of political propaganda. We show that such a strategy is used across China by combining ethnography with a computational analysis of a novel dataset of the titles of 197,303 propaganda posts made by 213 Chinese city-level governments on WeChat. We find that Chinese propagandists face intense pressures to demonstrate their effectiveness on social media because their work is heavily quantified–measured, analyzed, and ranked–with metrics such as views and likes. Propagandists use both clickbait and non-propaganda content (e.g., lifestyle tips) to capture clicks, but rely more heavily on clickbait because it does not decrease space available for political propaganda. Government propagandists use clickbait at a rate commensurate with commercial and celebrity social media accounts. The use of clickbait is associated with more views and likes, as well as greater reach of government propaganda outlets and messages. These results reveal how the advertising-based business model and affordances of social media influence political propaganda and how government strategies to control information are moving beyond censorship, propaganda, and disinformation.