A new study released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) shows that the Chinese government’s posting rate on Twitter and Facebook platforms for narrative propaganda about Xinjiang reached a record high last year. At the same Time, the Chinese Communist Party‘s use of international social media to spread disinformation has also received international attention.
New report shows CCP actively promotes alternative narratives about Xinjiang
According to a study released March 30 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Communist Party of China (CPC) is trying to distract international attention from its human rights abuses in Xinjiang by injecting massive amounts of disinformation into the global public discourse on Xinjiang and promoting CCP narratives to “positively portray” its minority policies in the region. The study shows that the frequency of tweets about Xinjiang in official CCP media and diplomatic Twitter accounts increased from a monthly average of about 280 in 2019 to nearly 500 in 2020.
The study shows that on Facebook, official CCP media accounts are one of the most popular sources of public opinion on content related to the Xinjiang issue. Communist authorities refer to the massive detention camps as vocational training centers, claim freedom of movement and happiness for Uighurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang, claim that related international condemnations and accusations are intended to discredit China, and actively promote this alternative narrative. In addition, the CCP has used U.S. social media platforms to criticize and smear Uighur victims. The report said the CCP’s audience for this narrative strategy is gradually expanding and gaining recognition in the West, with senior officials from a number of international organizations, including the WHO and the UN, playing a role.
In an interview, Xia Ming, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, described the CCP’s disinformation machine as a “stain-making machine. He said the CCP’s current approach to rule follows the new four basic principles of spreading hatred, spreading fear, using violence and employing lies: “The CCP controls a closed information system and has a huge state pollution machine in which it discharges water, which is the fundamental root cause.”
According to Xia Ming, the CCP has no clear goal in conducting false propaganda and promoting the CCP narrative, there are no widely accepted mainstream values, and the water propaganda machine has not formed a system: “The CCP’s main goal in spreading lies is to mess up, not to be constructive, and not to achieve the goal of making the world think that the CCP’s system is better.”
Xia Ming said the emerging social media is still in the adaptation period, and as each media and social network platform improves itself and relevant laws and regulations are implemented, the CCP’s disinformation propaganda tactics and activities will be curbed.
CCP Officials Launch Propaganda War on Twitter (ProPublica)
Chinese Communist Party Water Forces Escalate to Fool the International Public
A new report published by the U.S. political publication The Diplomat on March 30 also points to an escalation in the Chinese Communist Party’s tactics in conducting online disinformation campaigns. The report noted that the overall sophistication and impact of disinformation from China has increased significantly due to the massive investment of human and financial resources. Instead of using easily identifiable bot Twitter accounts, the CCP is disguising bot accounts as real users and circumventing the Twitter platform’s monitoring by reducing the number of connections between bot accounts and interactions with real accounts. As a result, the Chinese information posted by these fake accounts is more likely to gain the trust of real users, and the followers include news media from Turkey, Greece, India and other countries and former CNN anchors with 500,000 followers.
Research released last month by cybersecurity firm Graphika showed that despite repeated shutdowns of suspicious accounts by Facebook, Twitter and the oil pipe, these accounts could be restored in short order. The company found that the Twitter bot accounts studied posted more than 1,400 videos from February 2020 to January 2021, many of them reacting within 36 hours of certain breaking events in China.
Li Hengqing, a scholar at the Institute for Information and Strategic Studies, a U.S.-based private institution, told the station that the CCP’s promotion of alternative narratives and disinformation to compete for international discourse is counterproductive: “[The CCP] is not like the forced brainwashing of the past, but now it uses so-called soft power and soft packaging to make the image of China. But I think it will backfire, it reveals that the Chinese government is very weak-minded.”
According to Li Hengqing, the Chinese Communist Party is now “in trouble on all sides” in the international community in the face of Western democracies and the world’s siege on China’s human rights issues and the cover-up of the new Epidemic. Once the CCP’s disinformation is discovered, he said, it will cause even greater international outrage and backlash: “The right choice should be to tell the truth, do honest things, and fulfill its obligations and commitments in a conventional way, which is what the Chinese Communist Party should do. (Disinformation propaganda) can only confuse people for a short time, but in the long run, it will only get worse.”
Recent Comments