13 votes

China’s ruling Communist Party has opened a new front in its long, ambitious war to shape global public opinion: Western social media

Posted by cfabbro
Tags: social media, facebook, china, twitter, astroturfing, fake accounts, propaganda, disinformation, oxford internet institute, investigation, ccp, author.erika kinetz, source.associated press, long read
https://apnews.com/article/asia-pacific-china-europe-middle-east-government-and-politics-62b13895aa6665ae4d887dcc8d196dfc

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Title
Army of fake fans boosts China's messaging on Twitter
Word count
3237 words

1 comment

  1. ImmobileVoyager
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    What else is new ? The sad irony of it all is that we are paying for this. Advertising, which fuels Twitter, amounts to 2.5 % of all of our check-out receipt and truly is a taxation without...

    What else is new ?

    The sad irony of it all is that we are paying for this. Advertising, which fuels Twitter, amounts to 2.5 % of all of our check-out receipt and truly is a taxation without representation, yet one to which we silently consent. It is easy to imagine the furor if one of our Western "democratic" governments was to levy a 2.5 % tax on consumers good with the explicit intent to finance its PR.

    Sorry for the quotation marks around "democratic". I certainly am not one to forgo parliaments or universal suffrage or the rule of law, but I reckon that our relationship with trade has become quite unhealthy, to the extent of empowering communist propaganda.

    For the reader's convinience, I'll leave here the proper citation of the academic paper mentionned in this news dispatch :

    Marcel Schliebs, Hannah Bailey, Jonathan Bright, Philip N. Howard. "China’s Public Diplomacy Operations: Understanding engagement and inauthentic amplification of Chinese diplomats on Facebook and Twitter." Working Paper 2021.1. Oxford, UK: Programme on Democracy and Technology, Oxford University, 2021. https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/china-public-diplomacy-report. 40 pp.

    Naive side notes : is this paper actually intended to circulate and be read in paper form ? Given the arena in which those researchers evolve, I would expect them to adopt "digital first" working practises, and to be supported by a clerical staff competent enough to suppress Microsoft Word from the title bar and the Wordpress favicon. Those amateurish blemishes add to the impression that academia is several step behind the real digital word. (With all due respect nevertheless)

    6 votes