An Australian think tank released a study last week showing that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have used Western social media to scale up a major outreach campaign related to Xinjiang since 2020.
A study released March 30 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities have used U.S. social media significantly since 2020 to disseminate disinformation about the situation in Xinjiang or content that differs from mainstream media coverage. Of all the social media platforms, official Chinese media outlets have been most effective in pushing this content to international audiences through Facebook.
In particular, CCP diplomats and official media Twitter accounts tweeted about “Xinjiang” an average of nearly 500 times per month in 2020, but the average number of times these accounts tweeted about “Xinjiang” in 2019 was only about 280. The average number of times these accounts mentioned “Xinjiang” in tweets in 2019 was only about 280. On Facebook, the percentage of international users reached by official Chinese media accounts is much higher than on Twitter.
According to the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy Studies, several official media accounts rank in the top ten for most “likes” and “mentions of Xinjiang” on Facebook. Among them, CCTV International’s Facebook account has been the Facebook account with the most “likes” for Xinjiang-related posts for three consecutive years.
Jacob Wallis, the senior researcher who led the study, told Deutsche Welle, “We started to observe a proliferation of accounts of Communist diplomats and Communist media on U.S. social media platforms in 2018, so we know that the Communist Party is using these platforms to spread narratives and issues that are beneficial to the Communist Party. “
Valles points to data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute as evidence that Xinjiang postings from CCP official media accounts are able to gain significant reach on Facebook, and that they are able to increase the reach and interaction of their own narratives through Western social media. However, as more and more international studies or reports of CCP human rights abuses in Xinjiang began to appear in 2020, the advantage of CCP diplomats and CCP media in disseminating Xinjiang-related content through social media became weaker and weaker.
Wallis said, “A different narrative than the CCP official media is beginning to surface on Western social media, and we are beginning to see the CCP authorities change their tactics and try to engage in international political discussions related to Xinjiang through other mediums.”
Using Non-Mainstream Media to Validate Their Narrative
Research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that as the CCP’s official media became unable to dominate the discourse on Xinjiang-related issues through their own content, they began to rely on content from non-mainstream Western media outlets with positions and narratives similar to those of the CCP authorities to expand their influence on Western social media. This approach even plays a role in their interactions with international organizations.
The report notes that in addition to posting official media content on social media, the CCP authorities also use reports from non-mainstream media outlets with positions similar to theirs to reinforce their own Xinjiang narrative.
In the report, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute cites the U.S.-based online media outlet The Grayzone as an example, noting that the platform was cited at least 252 times by the English version of official CCP media between December 2019 and February 2021. Of these, The Grayzone was cited 61 times by the People’s Daily.
In an article published in 2020, The Gray Zone criticized foreign media reports related to forced labor in Xinjiang as decrees sponsored by the U.S. government and intelligence units, primarily to create a new “Cold War. In addition, The Gray Zone has published another report that attempts to point out the flaws in the research methodology of Xinjiang expert Adrian Zenz and criticizes the veracity of international claims that more than one million Uighurs are being held in re-education camps by the Chinese Communist authorities.
According to the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy Studies, The Grey Zone was not mentioned in any official Chinese or English-language Communist Party media reports until December 2019. The period during which reports of The Grey Zone began to be shared heavily on Twitter and Facebook coincided with the time when the CCP media began to cite Grey Zone reports in large numbers.
Wallis told Deutsche Welle that the Chinese Communist Party realized that in order to effectively gain a voice in international political discourse, they needed to build a more sophisticated media ecosystem and push their message in the Western world by feeding content from non-mainstream media outlets like The Gray Zone.
To some extent, I think the CCP has learned a little bit from the Russian information warfare during the 2016 U.S. presidential election that the content stance of The Gray Zone resembles that of an authoritarian regime and has identified The Gray Zone as playing an important role in Russia’s disinformation ecosystem,” he said. The Chinese Communists know they can use ‘assets’ like The Gray Zone to help them spread disinformation into the Western media ecosystem.”
Youtube and Twitter fake accounts stalking Xinjiang decree propaganda videos
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute team also found that a series of videos with a pro-CCP stance had recently appeared on Youtube and Twitter, depicting Uighurs’ family and idyllic lives in a very positive way. However, the team found it suspicious that there were inauthentic accounts on Youtube and Twitter that were helping to spread these videos.
Communist authorities have used social media to launch an information war related to Xinjiang cotton in the past few weeks.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute wrote in its research: “Although it is difficult to accurately identify the mastermind behind these Twitter accounts without technical signals, we believe that the decree campaign is linked to the Chinese Communist authorities. One reason is that analysis of the complete Twitter data by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Center for International Cyber Policy found that some of the accounts involved in the dissemination of these videos previously belonged to the Chinese Communist authorities. In addition, it was a Xinjiang-based company owned by the Chinese Communist authorities that created the videos for this wave of online action.”
The company mentioned by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute is Xinjiang Audio and Video Publishing House, a marketing company funded by the Communist Party of China’s United Front Work Department that specializes in producing videos depicting Uighurs. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s research found that people from these companies use inauthentic accounts to network on Twitter and Youtube and use these accounts to retweet tweets shared by Chinese people related to Xinjiang.
Wallis of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute told Deutsche Welle that the disinformation war waged by totalitarian states is a major challenge for democracies because totalitarian governments use the openness of democracies to disseminate disinformation. He argued that democracies should take lessons from Taiwan, a country that has been fighting the Chinese Communist Party’s disinformation war for years.
Taiwan has done a lot to strengthen its civil society and make the whole Taiwanese society resistant to disinformation warfare,” he said. These preparations allow democracies to continue to function under the threat of disinformation and at the same time have the ability to repair the information environment affected by disinformation.”
Wallis believes that because social media operators are on the front lines of receiving the impact of disinformation, they must detect and enforce regulations against the operation of malicious information. He told Deutsche Welle, “Democracies should establish a coordinated partnership structure between government, civil society and industry to help build the capacity of democracies to defend themselves against the disinformation war waged by totalitarian states. I think democracies have a lot of work to do to prepare.”
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