{"id":2698,"date":"2016-05-20T00:46:41","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T00:46:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iuhrdf.org\/en\/2016\/05\/20\/revealed-digital-army-making-hundreds-millions-social-media-posts-singing-praises-communist\/"},"modified":"2016-05-20T00:46:41","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T00:46:41","slug":"revealed-digital-army-making-hundreds-millions-social-media-posts-singing-praises-communist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/revealed-digital-army-making-hundreds-millions-social-media-posts-singing-praises-communist\/","title":{"rendered":"Revealed: the digital army making hundreds of millions of social media posts singing praises of the Communist Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

US researchers carry out first deep analysis of China\u2019s government-backed internet warriors known as the \u201850-cent gang\u2019<\/p>\n

PUBLISHED : Thursday, 19 May, 2016, 5:18pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 19 May, 2016, 11:43pm<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an open secret that China \u00ademploys a veritable army of \u00adinternet commentators to sing the government\u2019s praises and attack its critics, but researchers at Harvard University in the United States say they not only have \u00adevidence this is the case, but also what Beijing\u2019s motive is.<\/p>\n

The team headed by Dr Gary King, one of America\u2019s most \u00addistinguished political scientists, carried out what they describe as \u201cthe first large-scale empirical analysis\u201d of online comments by the notorious \u201c50-cent gang\u201d (wu\u00admao dang)<\/em> \u2013 so called in the popular but mistaken belief that this is the amount they are paid for each online post made in defence of the \u00adgovernment.<\/p>\n

The team examined a trove of more than 2,000 leaked emails from a district government \u00adinternet propaganda office in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, dating from February 2013 to November 2014, to begin \u201creverse engineering online \u00adcensorship in China\u201d.<\/p>\n

Most messages were communications between authorities and the 50-centers on their \u00adassignments and work reports.<\/p>\n

Over a year, the researchers \u00adindentified nearly 43,800 online messages posted accordingly, finding virtually all of them \u2013 more than 99 per cent \u2013 were generated by employees at more than 200 government agencies.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

King\u2019s team estimated the government posted about 488 million social media comments a year to deflect public criticism.<\/p>\n

Professor Qiao Mu, of Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the study shed light on the distraction strategy adopted by Chinese internet censors, but it \u00adoffered only \u201ca partial description of China\u2019s internet ecology\u201d as there were still \u201cvolunteer 50-centers\u201d involved in online debates and shaping public opinion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people \u2013 who are not getting paid or ordered to post online \u2013 do not want to see drastic changes in society and they are voluntarily defending the authorities,\u201d Qiao said.<\/p>\n

And their influence in shaping public views could be even larger than the government employees, who were simply \u201cgetting their job done without worrying about the impact\u201d, he added.<\/p>\n

Analysis of the messages \u00adrevealed the commentators typically avoided arguing with sceptics of the party and government, and shunned discussions on \u00adcontroversial issues.<\/p>\n

Instead, the posts are devoted primarily to distraction through cheerleading for the state or symbols of the regime, or espousing the revolutionary history of the Communist Party.<\/p>\n

The researchers also found no evidence the commentators received extra payment for the posts because they were government workers and it was part of their job.<\/p>\n

Typically the largest volume of online messages are posted around key political events such as Martyrs\u2019 Day or themes like the government\u2019s promotion of President Xi Jinping\u2019s \u201cChinese dream\u201d, or following major incidents such as riots or explosions in the troubled Xinjiang (\u65b0\u7586 ) autonomous region.<\/p>\n

Censors were more interested in removing posts by ordinary internet users calling for collective action than those merely criticising the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US researchers carry out first deep analysis of China\u2019s government-backed internet warriors known as the \u201850-cent gang\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-2698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2698"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=2698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}