By Tenzin Dharpo
DHARAMSHALA, May 21: China fabricates close to 488 million social media posts in a year as part of their propaganda efforts and also to distract its citizens from more political and social problems, so say a study by US based researchers.
Gary King, who leads the team says the prime objectives of the bogus posts are to divert people’s attention from political debates and bad-press of engaging social issues to more mundane diversions of cheering to the positives of the state and highlighting CCP’s revolutionary pasts. “In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense — stopping an argument is best done by distraction and changing the subject rather than more argument — but this had previously been unknown,” King told Bloomberg News.
The researchers claim that the fabricated posts are paid 50 cents each, hence the term “fifty cent part” although no evidence have been found of monetary transactions. The posts, researchers believe, were made by workers at government agencies including tax and human resource departments, and at courts, and are probably part of the employees’ job responsibilities.
The amount of fabricated posts, close to 488 million is same as the Twitter’s one day global volume. The sites run by Tencent Holdings Ltd., Sina Corp. and Baidu Inc. are injected with the bogus posts.
The claims made by the study are based on the leaked archives of 2013 and 2014 e-mails from the Internet Propaganda Office of Zhanggong, a county-level district of nearly half a million people in Ganzhou City, in Jiangxi, a province in southeast China. Although details that can be surmounted as substantial evidence such as name, contact information, and even photographs of many of the authors were found in the leaked data, researchers chose not to disclose them since the disclosure did not serve an academic purpose.
Researchers point to a pattern of the posts which follow a similar directive; avoid touchy issues, stop discussing potential collective street protests and attempting to divert people’s attention from the issue and not completely censor the topics, which lead to mass outcry.
“The main threat perceived by the Chinese regime in the modern era is not military attacks from foreign enemies but rather uprisings from their own people. Letting an argument die, or changing the subject, usually works much better than picking an argument and getting someone’s back,” the researchers wrote.
