China’s dictatorship is using social media to sow domestic disinformation

Prices the Chinese government pays for faking accounts

China is paying Chinese companies to create fake Facebook and Twitter accounts. Among other bad things, the accounts are used to deny brutalization of Chinese minorities and other citizens and to falsely claim that China is a democracy. The propaganda, lies and slanders are just as bad as those flowing from America’s neo-fascist radical right. The New York Times writes:

Flood global social media with fake accounts used to advance an authoritarian agenda. Make them look real and grow their numbers of followers. Seek out online critics of the state — and find out who they are and where they live.

China’s government has unleashed a global online campaign to burnish its image and undercut accusations of human rights abuses. Much of the effort takes place in the shadows, behind the guise of bot networks that generate automatic posts and hard-to-trace online personas.

Now, a new set of documents reviewed by The New York Times reveals in stark detail how Chinese officials tap private businesses to generate content on demand, draw followers, track critics and provide other services for information campaigns. That operation increasingly plays out on international platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which the Chinese government blocks at home.

The documents, which were part of a request for bids from contractors, offer a rare glimpse into how China’s vast bureaucracy works to spread propaganda and to sculpt opinion on global social media. They were taken offline after The Times contacted the Chinese government about them. (that’s called building plausible deniability)

On May 21, a branch of the Shanghai police posted a notice online seeking bids from private contractors for what is known among Chinese officialdom as public opinion management. Officials have relied on tech contractors to help them keep up with domestic social media and actively shape public opinion via censorship and the dissemination of fake posts at home. Only recently have officials and the opinion management industry turned their attention beyond China.

Some of the services the government wants

in the fake account propaganda effort

The NYT goes on to note that Shanghai police want to be able to create hundreds of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms quickly when a need arises. Apparently, officials want to be ready to release new accounts quickly to influence sensitive online discussions. Over the past two years, officialdom networks have been associated with an online surge in pro-China traffic and content. Government posts from usually support official government accounts or they attack social media users who criticize government policy. 

This is part of a shift in Chinese government tactics from brute force to be more subtle and quietly subversive. Part of the effort to quash dissent and criticism is a tactic called “touching the ground.” It amounts to use of fake accounts to try to find online critics who have been able to get around official barriers to disapproved content. In 2018, the government started arresting critics and forcing them to delete their online accounts.

Recently, the oppression campaign started targeting Chinese citizens living outside of China. The documents the NYT reviewed indicate that Chinese police want to discover the identities of people behind targeted accounts. Their users’ domestic connections to are traced back to people in mainland China. The thugs then threaten family members in China or detain overseas account holders after they return. Captured critics are required to delete posts or entire accounts. 

Chinese contractors are asked to produce dozens of fake videos each month and post them worldwide as part of what China calls its “battle of public opinion.”

This is part of what digital dictatorship will include from here on out. One can only wonder how effective social media is at spotting fake accounts and taking them down. Probably not very. It costs money to do that. Social media companies are there to boost profit, not to defend democracy or truth.  

5,000 RMB = ~$784

69,800 RMB = ~$10,947