The Chinese government has long been suspected of hiring as many as 2,000,000 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 the vast majority of 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 infer that
the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of the 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.
What is particularly interesting here is the degree of sophistication and understanding of social media dynamics is involved here. As the paper points out, it was previously assumed that the 50c Party (50cP for short) would operate along "traditional" authoritarian principles: Shouting down dissent, persecuting elements critical of the regime and stuff like that. As the paper points out, that preconception is wrong: What the 50cP is actually doing is a deft bit of social engineering: They are creating an environment where social media trends are heavily influenced by memes preserving and promoting the status quo, to such an extent that potentially destabilizing memes can not go viral.
This sort of thing, to me, is required reading for anyone discussing political issues on the net. Not because there is an equivalent effort in the west (to the best of my knowledge, anyway), but because it shows just how easy it is to shape the public discourse in the modern age.
In the US, for example, any number of special interest groups are doing what the 50cP is doing; Not on the same scale, not with the same degree of wide coordination, and not with the same goal (in fact, as the Trump movement or the NRA prove, some of these special interest groups are intentionally destabilizing influences), but using similar strategies.